Theory – Page 2 – Empty Hands History

Marxist Reading Group: Introductory Syllabus

Lenin says that “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.” Taking this lesson seriously, I developed this introductory syllabus on revolutionary Marxist theory for Ithaca DSA’s Marxist Reading Group, which has been meeting for almost a year. The study group’s purpose is to sharpen our theoretical tools and collectively develop the knowledge that we need in order to build a new world. The syllabus provides a background in classical Marxist theory written by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Luxemburg, as well as select pieces by Trotsky, Gramsci, and Mao.

Participants are expected to do around 20 to 30 pages of reading for each session. We meet every other week on Zoom, although we hope to begin meeting in person soon (Covid permitting). This is not like a university class; we read and discuss the theory together, help each other understand it, and apply it to our own lives and political work.

Each session is led by two co-facilitators (rotating each meeting) who facilitate the conversation around discussion questions that they have developed—usually three main questions, ideally referencing specific points in the texts. They will sometimes give brief framing thoughts at the beginning of the session. The final discussion question typically relates the text to our own political work so that we can collectively draw out lessons from it.

Unit One: Classical Marxism (Marx and Engels)

All page numbers here are from the Marx-Engels Reader (2^nd edition, edited by Robert C. Tucker) Link to PDF

Week One: Intro to Marx

(Marx and Engels) The Communist Manifesto (1848) [472-500]

Week Two: Wage Labor and Alienation

(Marx) Excerpt from Wage Labor and Capital (1847) [203-206]
(Marx) Excerpt from Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1844) [70-84]

Week Three: Commodity Fetishism

(Marx) Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 1: Commodities (1867) [302-329]

Week Four: Historical Materialism

(Marx) “Marx on the History of His Opinions” (1859) [just read the long paragraph on page 4-5]
(Marx) Theses on Feuerbach (1845) [143-145]
(Marx) The German Ideology Part 1 (1846) [148-175 and 192-200]

Week Five: History, Anthropology, Proto-Feminism

(Engels) The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) [734-59]

Week Six: The Paris Commune

(Marx): The Civil War in France (1871) [625-642]

Week Seven: Scientific Socialism

(Engels) Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1892) [683-717]

Unit Two: Revolutionary Socialism (Lenin and Luxemburg)

Week Eight: What Is To Be Done?

(Lenin), What Is To Be Done? (1902) [I heavily excerpted this; I am happy to share the document I made, email me at emptyhands@protonmail.com. Alternatively, you could read this whole piece over the course of multiple sessions.]

Week Nine: Luxemburg’s Critique of Lenin

(Luxemburg) “Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy” (1904) in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (edited by Peter Hudis & Kevin B. Anderson)[248-65]

Week Ten: The Mass Strike

(Luxemburg) “The Mass Strike,” (1906), excerpts in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader [168-99]

Week Eleven: Reform or Revolution, Part One

(Luxemburg) Reform or Revolution (1899), excerpts in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader [128-46]

Week Twelve: Reform or Revolution, Part Two

(Luxemburg) Reform or Revolution (1899), excerpts in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader [146-67]

Week Thirteen: The State and Revolution, Part One

(Lenin) The State and Revolution (1917), Chapter 1, Chapter 2 (only section 3), Chapter 3 (section two and short part of section 5, beginning “Marx deduced from the whole history of socialism… and ending with “confirm Marx’s brilliant historical analysis) [email me at emptyhands@protonmail.com for the document I made with these excerpts]

Week Fourteen: The State and Revolution, Part Two

(Lenin) The State and Revolution (1917), Chapter 5 “The Economic Basis of the Withering Away of the State”

Week Fifteen (Optional): Discussing DSA’s National Political Platform

DSA Political Platform (2021) https://www.dsausa.org/dsa-political-platform-from-2021-convention/

Unit Three: Mini-Unit on Socialist Strategy (Trotsky, Gramsci, and Mao)

Week Sixteen: The Transitional Program

(Trotsky) Excerpts from “The Transitional Program” (1938)

Week Seventeen: Hegemony and the Role of Intellectuals

(Gramsci) “The Study of Philosophy and of Historical Materialism” [58-75]
(Gramsci) “The Formation of Intellectuals” [118-25] (page numbers from The Modern Prince & Other Writings)

Week Eighteen: The Mass Line

(Mao) Quotations from Mao Tse-Tung, “Chapter 11: The Mass Line”
(Liberation Road) “The Mass Line: What It Is and How to Use It”

Abolitionist Communism: Theorizing Our Practice

One of my favorite recent albums is Bambu’s EP Sharpest Tool in the Shed. Released in October 2020, it is a product of coronavirus and the George Floyd Rebellion. It speaks directly to the moment in the summer of 2020 when mutual aid networks proliferated, insurrection grew across the country, and the political logic of abolitionist communism was developed in the streets.

In the interlude track “Signing Off,” Bambu is quoted at an activist panel as he lays out the basic points of unity developed in the recent struggle:

“It’s still one rifle per family, still working for the party.
It’s not socialism versus communism or communism versus anarchy or whatever.
It’s about us toppling the machine and worrying about that shit when we win.
Dismantle the state, fuck the law, abolish the police, educate the masses, organize the hood.”

What can we make of this? Bambu is a communist. He is steeped in Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, informed by his experience as a poor Filipino in California and referencing the Maoist movement in the Philippines. And yet, what is the political program that he lays out as the basic points of unity? “Dismantle the state, fuck the law, abolish the police, educate the masses, organize the hood.”

There is nothing here about seizing the state and wielding it to build socialism. It’s about self-organization to topple the power structures of the state and capitalism and build a new world from below. Here we see the fundamental challenge that abolitionism poses to Marxism-Leninism and all political orientations that seek to use the state as a tool for liberation.

Am I calling Bambu an anarchist? Regardless of his own self-identification, I’m not sure that would be a useful label. Here, our traditional linguistic/political categories fail us.

Bambu is an abolitionist communist, which necessarily entails an anti-state orientation. Abolitionism has fundamentally changed the political landscape of the left, and I think we’re still reckoning with what that means. Abolitionist communist practice has outstripped our theorization of it. As the George Floyd Rebellion recedes into the past, we need to sharpen our analysis and develop new theoretical tools for liberation.

A few places to begin:

William C. Anderson, The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition (2021)

Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (2019)

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013)

The Invisible Committee, Now (2017)

Geo Maher, A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete (2021)

“Feminism Practices What Anarchism Preaches”: Anarcha-Feminism in the 20th Century (Panel Recording)

I recently organized an online panel at the Boston Anarchist Bookfair on November 14th (2021), which was recorded and uploaded to Youtube. My own talk, which begins around 41:20, is titled “‘We’re Pro-Choice and We Riot’: Anarcha-Feminism in Love and Rage (1989-98).” It is based on research and interviews that I have been conducting for my dissertation on North American anarchism in the late 20th century.

My talk explores the theorization and practice of revolutionary intersectional anarcha-feminism, with a major focus on abortion and reproductive freedom but also addressing queer and trans liberation, debates around pornography, CUNY student struggles, and the fight against patriarchy within Love and Rage itself. You can watch it here:

As I say in my presentation, if you were involved with any of what I discuss I would love to talk to you about it! Check out more about the anarchist oral history project I’m involved in here.

Reading Amyl and the Sniffers’ “Capital” Politically

“Comfort to me, what does that even mean? One reason, do we persevere?/
Existing for the sake of existing, meaning disappears.”

Thus opens the song “Capital” from the Australian punk band Amyl and the Sniffers’ new album, Comfort To Me. The album is shaped by the same driving intensity of their previous music, but it takes further steps towards conscious political opposition to patriarchy, capitalism, and settler colonialism. In this short piece, I analyze the lyrics of “Capital” to explore this political evolution. After detouring through Marx’s “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” I ultimately argue for the utility of cultivating radical political consciousness in subcultural milieus, which seemingly laid the foundation for Amyl and the Sniffers’ political turn.

***

The turn to conscious politics is signaled first by the recognition of the politics of personal experience. The singer, Amy, attempts to reclaim her body and life from the world of patriarchal standards and violence, and she recognizes this as the first step in “basic politics”:

“Meanwhile, I only just started learning basic politics/
Meanwhile, they sexualize my body and get mad when I exploit it”

On another song on the album, “Knifey,” she addresses the threat of violence against women and vows to fight back.

“All I ever wanted was to walk by the park/
All I ever wanted was to walk by the river, see the stars/
Please! Stop fucking me up
. . .
Out comes the night, out comes my knifey/
This is how I get home nicely.”

Since society will not accept her efforts at self-determination or even basic safety, Amy realizes that she has to fight for it. This basic recognition of the contradictions of patriarchal violence and exploitation lay the foundation for a broader reckoning with a sick culture that is ultimately driven by capital. The chorus of the song puts it simply:

“It’s just for capital/
Am I an animal?/
It’s just for capital, capital, capital./
But do I care at all?”

The “animalization” of humanity by capital takes us back to Marx’s early analysis of wage labor under capitalism in his “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” Marx argues that labor under capitalism has been transformed into an experience that alienates us (removes us) from what makes us human, and thus reduces us to the level of animals.

Marx argues that capitalism is experienced as an intensely alienating social system because it perverts the fundamental activity that makes us human. Unlike animals, humans produce the conditions of our own social lives: food, clothing, shelter, culture, etc. When we labor, we put part of ourselves into the object of production. In a non-capitalist system, we produce goods for the use of ourselves, our families, and our communities. We put our life into the products, but we “regain” this life when our community uses the goods.

Under capitalist wage labor, commodities are produced not for use but rather for exchange value. We labor not to feed, clothe, and shelter ourselves and our community, but rather for the sake of profit for a capitalist. We imbue the commodities we produce with our life, but they confront us as something outside of ourselves, in control of another person for their profit. These commodities become “fetishes”: they seem to be imbued with energy of their own which is disconnected from the labor that has produced them. Capitalism becomes a system in which commodities interact with each other in the marketplace, disguising the real social relations between humans. We suffer a profound disconnect with the world and our own sense of humanity.

The characteristic of labor as external to the worker means that “the worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.” But this feeling of alienation at work has expanded to encompass our entire lives. Unlike in Marx’s time, we are now confronted with an entire world that takes the commodity form. Western societies have turned into mass consumer societies, where what makes us human outside of work is literally buying commodities. If these commodities are the products of something that is so alien to us, this is bound to be a very alienating existence. We have as little control over the world of commodities as we do over the political processes that lead to the destruction of the natural world. Again, “It’s just for capital/Am I an animal?”

***

In the next verse, Amyl and the Sniffers turn towards the destructive effects of climate change:

“Australia is burning, but, aye, I’m not learning how to be more conscious/
And the farmers hope for rain while the landscape torches/
Swimming in the river, I’m part of the river, not convinced how much will change/
Experiencing experiences as if they’re all the same”

Amy is swimming in the river of existence, seeing the terrible effects of climate change but unable to conceive of how her actions could change the situation. She is left with a feeling of alienation from existence, alienation from her own experience. This is a classic response to the alienation of life under capitalism. As she says in a second part of the chorus: “Freedom don’t exist/humans don’t exist/existing to exist/life is meaningless.” This again reflects Marx’s analysis: capitalism animalizes us, meaning that humans no longer exist; under capitalism, we exist just to exist, work just to survive, and thus life is meaningless.

***

After beginning with her own experience as a woman under capitalism, Amy begins to question the entire existence of Australia itself. In the next verse, she snarls that:

“First port of call should be changing the date and changing the flag/
Of course I have disdain for this place, what are you thinking?/
You took their kids and you locked them up, up in a prison”

She is referring to the process of settler colonialism in Australia, specifically how the children of the aboriginal peoples were stolen as official government policy up until the 1960s and into the 1970s. Settler colonialism and genocide of the indigenous peoples laid the foundation for Australia as a country. Thus, the entire project is rotten and must be challenged at its core.

The key here, for me, is how she expresses this analysis: “*of course* I have disdain for this place.” It is a common sense rejection of the brutality of settler colonialism, a common sense rejection of the Australian project: “of course.” And yet, this is clearly not broadly shared across Australian society. Rather, I think it is a common sense that is actively cultivated in youth subculture, particularly punk. This is how a punk band such as Amyl and the Sniffers can release a song with a “common sense” rejection of the Australian state and capitalism. The common sense is also based on an ethical connection between the personal and the political: Amy easily connects her own experience as a woman fighting to determine her own relationship to her body and sexuality to an ethical rejection of settler colonialism and capitalist exploitation.

***

So, where do we go from here? Given our alienation and the meaninglessness of life under late capitalism, perhaps an answer begins with the cultivation of intensity: new forms of life that are non-commodified, that prioritize direct experience in the search for meaning. The last verse of “Capital” gestures towards this possibility:

“So ordinary and normal, don’t see the intensity that it is/
And I wonder why I get dopamine released when I give/
Disdain and excitement dually, the illusion can be fleeting/
I love feeling drunk on the illusion of meaning”

Of course, this ends on an ambivalent note. Does the intensity of a punk show provide real meaning, or is it just another illusion? The next step, I think, is to take the intensity of a punk show—and the broader forms of life and common sense that the punk scene enables—and draw connections with other oppositional spaces, intensities, and projects. This can help create archipelagos of resistance, networks that produce a fighting coalition of (sub)cultural forms that together can challenge capital and replace its animalization with a meaningful life. The question then becomes how to move from scattered subcultural resistance to a broader, more coherent counterhegemonic force. We can start with punk, but we cannot end there.

Living Communism: Theory and Practice of Autonomy and Attack

“So the revolutionary gesture no longer consists in a simple violent appropriation of this world; it divides into two. On the one hand, there are worlds to be made, forms of life made to grow apart from what reigns, including by salvaging what can be salvaged from the present state of things, and on the other, there is the imperative to attack, to simply destroy the world of capital… it’s clear that the worlds one constructs can maintain their apartness from capital only together with the fact of attacking it and conspiring against it… Only an affirmation has the potential for accomplishing the work of destruction. The destituent gesture is thus desertion and attack, creation and wrecking, and all at once, in the same gesture.”
The Invisible Committee[1]

I wrote this piece after I read Now (2017) when all I could think and write about was the Invisible Committee. I’m revisiting it to decide if I want to do anything with it. It still feels useful to me. Here’s the introduction:

May Day, 1987: thousands of Autonomen, the mysterious masked and black-clad “unruly youth” who are the terror of West Germany, riot in West Berlin. After a decade spent honing their street-fighting tactics, the revolutionaries stage an offensive against state repression by blocking streets, occupying buildings, and fighting a low-intensity urban guerrilla war against state forces. Continually expanding their liberated zone throughout the night, the Autonomen eventually control much of Kreuzberg, the dilapidated neighborhood that is their base. After a night of violent jubilation, they return to their numerous squatted houses and social centers to nurse their wounds, curse the police, and celebrate a temporary victory. Although the German media depicted the Autonomen as little more than violent mobs whose only motivation was destruction,[2] the radicals had also spent the previous decade painstakingly constructing—and fighting to defend—an extensive network of squatted alternative infrastructure across West Berlin and throughout West Germany.

Throughout the 1980s, the Autonomen squatted hundreds of abandoned buildings and turned them into group housing, social centers, movement bars, and cultural spaces used by the thousands of squatters and tens of thousands of supporters. They constructed rich networks of autonomous spaces meant to provide both alternative forms of living and bases of attack. At their best, these networks of alternative spaces and infrastructure functioned as dual power and urban liberated territory in which the revolution was lived through a communism of everyday life.

More recently, the Invisible Committee has theorized the commune as a space of everyday communism that constructs counter-infrastructure, transforms our relationship to each other and the territory we inhabit, and destitutes state power. The Invisible Committee is a collective of French post-autonomist communists (formerly operating under the moniker Tiqqun) who trace their intellectual lineage through Italian Autonomia and the German Autonomen, among others.[3] The collective is the best known of the contemporary theorists of post-autonomist communization.[4]

Though born in the Parisian squatting scene, the collective grew disillusioned with the radical subcultural milieu in the capital and moved to the tiny town of Tarnac, where they live communally and collectively run a farm, bar, and general store.[5] Introduced to the American popular imagination primarily through the controversy surrounding their book The Coming Insurrection (2007, 2009) and their sensational trial for domestic terrorism beginning in 2008 which finally concluded with acquittals earlier this year, the Invisible Committee has greatly influenced the contemporary ultra-Left in the United States.[6]

The Invisible Committee continued to develop their particular variety of post-autonomist communization theory in To Our Friends (2014), which reflects on the European movements of the squares and associated spectacular abortive insurrections (especially in Greece), and their latest work, Now (2017), which explores the possibilities and practices of communism present within the fragmented world of late capitalism. Although the collective is relatively widely read (sometimes even beyond the academic post-autonomist ultra-Left!), their historical and theoretical background is less well-known in the United States. This paper in part attempts to connect the collective’s theoretical work with the history and praxis of European autonomous movements that it draws from.

This paper will combine historical insights from the Autonomen with theoretical interventions from the Invisible Committee in order to make several related arguments. First, the commune form creates alternative worlds in which liberalism is combatted and collective struggle against alienation takes place. Second, communes operate according to a unique spatial logic that ruptures capitalist geography, promotes new spatial practices, and establishes non-alienated inhabitation of territory. Third, the Autonomen and the Invisible Committee theorize and act upon a new conception of communism as a collective practice of living the “good life” in revolutionary struggle rather than as solely a (future) economic system of organizing production. Fourth, alternative infrastructure provides the means to practice this everyday lived communism. Finally, revolutionary insurrectionary practice takes the form of networks of communes seceding from the capitalist system to form liberated territory that functions as a base from which to attack and destitute capitalist state power.

[1] The Invisible Committee, Now, 86-88.

[2] A stereotype that many within the movement cared little to contest; indeed, some Autonomen went so far as to believe that “freedom is the short moment between throwing a rock and the rock hitting its target. However, we all agree that, in the first place, we want to dismantle and to destroy—to formulate affirmative ideals is not our priority.” “Autonomous Theses 1981,” Fire and Flames, 174. I take some issue with this intentionally provocative statement though: as this paper details, it is clear that the Autonomen did indeed formulate affirmative ideals and act on them.

[3] In an early work of theirs, the Invisible Committee make this connection explicit. It is well worth quoting this section in full, in part to orient ourselves to the radical position from which to write of communes and revolution: “The ‘we’ that speaks here is not a delimitable, isolated we, the we of a group. It is the we of a position. In these times this position is asserted as a double secession: secession first with the process of capitalist valorisation; then secession with all the sterility entailed by a mere opposition to empire, extra-parliamentary or otherwise; thus a secession with the left. Here ‘secession’ means less a practical refusal to communicate than a disposition to forms of communication so intense that, when put into practice, they snatch from the enemy most of its force. To put it briefly, such a position refers to the force of irruption of the Black Panthers and the collective canteens of the German Autonomen, to the tree houses and art of sabotage of the British neo-luddites, to the careful choice of words of the radical feminists, to the mass self-reductions of the Italian autonomists, and the armed joy of the June 2nd Movement. From now on all friendship is political.” The Invisible Committee, Call, 10.

[4] The closest equivalent in the United States revolves around the currents of anarchism associated with CrimethInc. and the more recent formations expressed through the popular autonomist/anarchist website “It’s Going Down,” as well as the journal Endnotes (which is international, though mostly based in the UK). The Invisible Committee’s work is put out in the US by Semiotext(e), which has been responsible for the translation and popularization of much Italian and French autonomist theory. Several other small radical presses, including Minor Compositions, Autonomedia, and Little Black Cart, also publish (post-)autonomist theoretical work. See for example Benjamin Noys’s edited volume Communization and its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles (2011) for a contemporary exploration of some of the theoretical currents of post-autonomism and communization.

[5] Aaron Lake Smith, “Vive Le Tarnac Nine!”

[6] For US anarchist analysis of the trial and its impact, see CrimethInc., “The Tarnac Verdicts: Unraveling the Logic of Anti-Terrorism,” which traces the history of the trial as well as a little of the impact of the Invisible Committee on the US radical scene and the common roots and resonances of the Invisible Committee and CrimethInc.; and It’s Going Down, “The Palace of Justice: Inside the Tarnac Nine Trial.” The trial received widespread international attention because the (alleged) members of the Invisible Committee were charged with domestic terrorism for the act of (allegedly) sabotaging a train line that was transporting nuclear waste to Germany. Sabotage is, of course, a time-honored tradition in France, and many were aghast that this venerable historical practice was being treated as “terrorism.”

David Graeber’s Anarchism: A Vision, an Attitude, and a Set of Practices

I realized that I missed the anniversary of David Graeber’s death a few days ago. I want to mark it, because Graeber was in many ways a model for the kind of engaged intellectual work that I aspire to do.

Graeber’s book on anarchism in the anti-globalization movement, Direct Action: An Ethnography, remains one of my favorites. I used a section of it, combined with his classic short pamphlet “Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You!” to introduce anarchism in a class on American Anarchism that I taught to first-year college students a couple years ago. In Direct Action, Graeber argues that anarchism consists of three interlocking parts: a vision, an attitude, and a set of practices.

1. First, the anarchist vision refers to people who endorse an explicitly anarchist doctrine or what Graeber refers to as “a certain vision of human possibilities” (214)

2. Second is the anarchist attitude, meaning a rejection of unjust authority and hierarchy. In this sense, anarchism has always existed, across time and across every society, for people have always rebelled against unjust authority and have fought for equality and justice

3. Third is a set of practices—or a set of institutions, habits, and practices. This entails building egalitarian forms of organization which produce and are supported by an egalitarian ethos.

Graeber says that it is the combination of these three things—the vision, the attitude, and the set of practices—that produces something we can call anarchism: “It’s when the three reinforce each other—when a revulsion against oppression causes people to try to live their lives in a more self-consciously egalitarian fashion, when they draw on those experiences to produce visions of a more just society, when those visions, in turn, cause them to see existing social arrangements as even more illegitimate and obnoxious—that one can begin to talk about anarchism. Hence anarchism is in no sense a doctrine. It’s a movement, a relationship, a process of purification, inspiration, and experiment. This is its very substance” (215-16).

And of course, let us all remember Graeber’s ultimate insistence that “direct action is a matter of acting as if you were already free.” But it is clear that we must simultaneously act as if we were free today AND build the structures, organizations, relationships, and institutions that enable true freedom for all. This is the task and the promise of anarchism.

Theory as Toolbox for Everyday Life

Reading Guy Debord and Hannah Arendt side by side in the past week, I was struck by how alive the former feels while the latter feels hollow and distant. Why is this? Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle helps me explain my own life and experience; he lays bare the alienation and inhumanity of the total commodification of human society and the domination of life by the spectacle. Debord and his Situationist comrades also give tools for changing our lives; see of course Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life. For me, this gets to the heart of theory’s purpose.

At its best, theory helps us explain our lives and experiences, deepens our understanding of society, and provides us tools to change both our own lives and the world. As Gilles Deleuze put it in a conversation with Foucault, “a theory is exactly like a box of tools. It has nothing to do with the signifier. It must be useful. It must function. And not for itself. If no one uses it, beginning with the theoretician himself (who then ceases to be a theoretician), then the theory is worthless or the moment is inappropriate.”

To bring this closer to our own times, I have been moved by the outpouring of writing about Aragorn!, the recently-deceased anarchist responsible for Little Black Cart, The Anarchist Library, and numerous other anarchist projects and infrastructure of the past two decades. (See CrimethInc.’s excellent elegy for him here. Though I disagree with much of his political approach, I particularly enjoy Aragorn!’s “Stories of the Raccoon People” and “Stories of the Bear People,” the first part of a planned series of Anarchist Myths.) In a wide-ranging oral history interview conducted in 2018, Aragorn! addresses his approach to theory, practice, and everyday life, particularly regarding the impact of the Situationists on his own life:

“The [Situationist International] Anthology, just that book and then Society of the Spectacle: that was a full decade of my life, to really understand all the threads and the connections and why that shit mattered. No, absolutely.”
Interviewer: “As you’re struggling through these difficult texts and wrapping your head around them, did you have sense of how those connected to your daily life and your immediate sense of engagement with the world?”
Aragorn!: “[…] For me the, the immediate question I ask any time I receive a new text is, is, how does this matter to my life? That’s always basically been my central project. The reason I became a publisher was because I wanted these things not just to be relevant to my life, but to share that enthusiasm with other people. For me, the idea, the beautiful idea, is about—how do you connect ideas to living?
[…] So early on, I said that all of the anarchist texts that I’ve read, perhaps some of the reason why it took me a long time to read them was because I really found every page to be a challenge: how do I put this into practice in my life?”

Of course, this is decidedly not the dominant approach to theory within the academy. Even the most radical Marxist academics are typically divorced from social struggle, political engagement, and attempts to “live the revolution.” And as Raoul Vaneigem reminds us, “people who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.”

As theorists and academics, we must work from within—or at least connected to—movements to change the world. Our own experience of struggle, of the creation of new ways of being and relating to each other, is necessary to produce theory which is useful to the movement. Just as important, we should take inspiration from Aragorn! and constantly ask how to apply theory to our everyday lives. Theory should be a tool for both individual and social transformation. If it isn’t, then what are we doing?

My Body, Too, Is A Battleground: Fighting Where We Stand

“Once the collapse of colonial power revealed the colonialism of all power exercised over human beings, the issues of race and skin colour became about as significant as a crossword competition. […] Far be it from me to contest the spirit of generosity that inspired antiracism in times still not far distant. But since I cannot alter the past it holds scant interest for me. I am speaking in the here and now, and nobody can persuade me, in the name of Alabama or South Africa and their spectacular exploitation, to forget that the epicentre of such problems lies within me, and within every human being who is humiliated and scorned by every aspect of a society that prefers to think of itself as ‘well policed’ rather than as the police state that it clearly is. I shall not relinquish my share of violence.”
Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967)

This passage has long stuck out to me for its crudity. As I reread Vaneigem today, I see a note from my past reading scrawled in the margin: “bad take!” I am inclined to agree with my past dismissal. There is so much wrong in this passage that addressing it hardly seems worth it: the idea that colonialism and racism was a thing of the past, that the violence and humiliation suffered by a white male French intellectual was in any way comparable to that of Apartheid South Africa or the Apartheid US South. Better, perhaps, to just bracket Vaneigem’s “bad takes” and focus on what the book still has to offer.

And yet, I keep returning to the passage. For all its flaws, what can we take from it? For I, too, am a middle-class white male intellectual. It is all too easy for those like me to deny our own stakes in social transformation. Indeed, it is much simpler to acknowledge our privilege and perform allyship with the oppressed than it is to acknowledge that we, too, have something to fight for. I do not trust people who only fight for others.

Capitalism is not simply a system outside of us; it is within us, too. Commodity production tears us in two. Our labor, that which should make us feel human, is alienated and turned against us. Our lives are deadened and anxious. As Vaneigem puts it, “what about the impossibility of living, this stifling mediocrity, this absence of passion? This jealous fury to which we are driven when the rankling of never being ourselves makes us imagine that others are happy? This feeling of never really being inside your own skin? Let nobody say these are minor details or secondary considerations.”

Are these at all comparable to police brutality, oppression, and systemic violence carried out against Black people in the United States? No! Of course not! But unless privileged white people recognize the fault lines within ourselves, our own reasons to fight, our own skin in the game, then it is all too easy for our action to resemble (and descend into) liberal charity.

“I shall not relinquish my share of violence.” This line can be read in multiple ways—and these multiple meanings can co-exist. Capitalism runs through each of us. My body, too, is a battleground. And we must each fight where we stand.

Why Social Media Feels So Bad: Alienation in the Time of Coronavirus

Social media accentuates our profound alienation from our lives and relationships. Through social media, we construct images of ourselves which interact with the images of others. The social relations between images have become more “real” than the social relations between people. In order to understand the mechanisms at work here, this post will quickly trace a line from Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism through the Situationist “society of the spectacle” to the intensification of spectacular relationships through social media today. I end with thoughts towards a practice of care and connection in the time of coronavirus.

Commodity Fetishism and Alienation

The Spectacle

In Guy Debord’s seminal Situationist text Society of the Spectacle (1967), he argues that the commodity form has so thoroughly dominated modern society that it has produced a totally fetishized world in its own image. Life is dominated not by concrete commodities but rather by images and representations which relate to each other. “The spectacle,” Debord says, “is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.” Capitalism first degraded being into having, then having into appearing. What matters now is less the reality of possessing money and commodities, but the appearance of possession. Appearance has become autonomous from social reality. Representation has become independent and even superior to our lived experience. Images are more real than reality itself.

Social Media

The advent of social media has intensified the domination of life by representation. The spectacle has deepened its grip on our lives further than Debord could imagine in his era of unilateral mass media. Social media has made us each producers of the spectacle. But our collaboration does not liberate us or give us control over the process of production. As Marx points out, alienation is located within the act of production itself. Labor is what makes us human; labor which produces commodities is itself degrading. When we craft an image of ourselves which represents us to the world, we lose part of our sense of reality and humanity. Our image interacts with other equally false images through the medium of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok.

This is why social media makes us feel so bad: it is not simply that we do not live up to the carefully crafted images of others, but rather that we must craft our own image to interact with their images. We do not relate directly to others; instead, our images relate to their images, semi-autonomously from reality. Through our production of images, the fetish of representation replaces our human relationships. It is easy to say that the solution is not to participate, but coronavirus has eliminated even this seemingly easy choice.

Social Media and Social Distancing

Our social distancing during coronavirus will likely deepen this sense of alienation. It appears that our only option to maintain many of our social relations may be to embrace social media. But perhaps this is an opportunity to humanize our relationship to social media. Maybe we can let go of the compulsion to project a carefully crafted image of ourselves on social media. Can we share our fears and failures alongside our successes? How can we use social media to practice care and connection with each other, to make it through this crisis with our sense of humanity strengthened rather than depleted?

This time of uncertainty is also an opportunity to experiment with new forms of social relations outside of both social media and our typical daily lives. Alongside posting in our online mutual aid groups, we can take concrete actions in our community. We can buy groceries for those who cannot, organize our neighborhoods to look after each other, post art on telephone poles, and write messages of solidarity on every surface to forge community out of our solitary daily walks. Against the bleak atomization of social distancing we must act consciously to build community and solidarity.