The real communist question is not ‘how to produce,’ but ‘how to live.’
The Invisible Committee
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.
Raoul Vaneigem
What is communism? Can it mean anything beyond either a future mode of production or a repressive ideology disproved by history? What might it look like to pursue a communist politics and communist “form-of-life” today? This course traces a revolutionary communist orientation through a broad history of subversive European thought and practice. Putting classic Marxist and anarchist texts in conversation with contemporary revolutionary theory, we will follow a line from the medieval commune’s “passionate intensity of life” to the present-day call from the Invisible Committee to “spread anarchy, live communism.” Particular attention will be paid to the concept of alienation, the daily practice of radicals, and what became known as the “revolution of everyday life.” The first half of the course offers a grounding in classical anti-capitalist thought and practice, from Marx and Kropotkin to Lenin, with inflection points in the Paris Commune and the Russian Revolution. The remainder of the semester explores the post-WWII revolutionary praxis of the Situationists, Autonomist Marxism, and what we might call a rhizomatic Deleuzian communism. Authors include Marx, Kropotkin, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Lukács, Benjamin, Debord, Vaneigem, Deleuze, Guattari, Bifo, Federici, Hardt, Negri, Ross, Agamben, Tiqqun, the Invisible Committee, and more.
Unit One: Historical Groundings: A Medieval Commune/ism?
Week 1: The Passionate Intensity of Medieval Life and the Use of History
- Johan Huizinga, “The Passionate Intensity of Life” from The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919)
- Mikhail Bakhtin, short excerpt from the Introduction to Rabelais and His World (1965)
- Peter Kropotkin, “Mutual Aid in the Medieval City” from Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902)
- CrimethInc., “The Brethren of the Free Spirt” from Days of War, Nights of Love (2001)
- Friedrich Nietzsche, short excerpt from “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” in Untimely Considerations (1874)
Week 2: Modernity and the Capitalist Counterrevolution
- Silvia Federici, “All the World Needs a Jolt” and “The Accumulation of Labor and the Degradation of Women,” from Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (1998)
- Stephen Toulmin, excerpt from “What Is the Problem About Modernity?” from Cosmopolis (1990)
Unit 2: Marxism and Anarchism: The Communist Imaginary
Week 3: Marxism
- Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)
- Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1844)
- Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (1852)
Week 4: Anarchist Communism
- Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread (1892)
- An alternative vision: Sergey Nechayev, “Catechism of a Revolutionary” (1869)
Week 5: The Paris Commune
- Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (2016)
Week 6: What Is to Be Done? Two Answers
- Michael R. Katz and William G. Wagner, “Introduction” to Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done? (1989)
- Nikolai Chernyshevsky, “Ch 4: Second Marriage; xvi: Vera Pavlovna’s Fourth Dream” from What Is to Be Done? (1863)
- Vladimir Lenin, What Is to Be Done? (1902)
Unit 3: The Russian Revolution and Beyond: the Leninist Vision
Week 7: The Russian Revolution and the Leninist Vision of Communism
- Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917)
- Antonio Gramsci, “Notes on Machiavelli’s Politics” from The Modern Prince & Other Writings (1957)
Week 8: Marxist Alternatives to Lenin?
- Rosa Luxemburg, “The Mass Strike” (1906)
- Leon Trotsky, “Results and Prospects” (1906)
Week 9: Selected Insights from The Frankfurt School
- Gyorgy Lukács, excerpt from “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” in History and Class Consciousness (1923)
- Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1942)
Unit 4: The Situationists and Autonomism: The Revolution of Everyday Life
Week 10: The Situationists and May ‘68
- Guy Debord, chapters 1-4 and 8-9 from The Society of the Spectacle (1967)
- Raoul Vaneigem, Introduction, chapters 1-2 and 12-25 from The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967)
Week 11: Autonomist Marxism
- Michael Hardt, “Introduction: Laboratory Italy,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics
- Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “Labor and Alienation in the Philosophy of the 60s” from The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy (2009)
Week 12: Italian Autonomia and German Autonome
- George Katsiaficas, “From 1968 to Autonomy,” “Italian Autonomia,” “Sources of Spontaneous Politics in Germany,” and excerpts from “The (Anti)Politics of Autonomy” and “The Theory of Autonomy” from The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (2006)
- Geronimo, “Appendix: ‘Autonomous Theses 1981’” from Fire and Flames: A History of the German Autonomist Movement (2012)
Unit 5: Rhizomatic Communism: The Communist Form-of-Life
Week 13: The Rhizome and the Nomadic War Machine
- Michel Foucault, “Method” and excerpt from “Right of Death and Power over Life” from History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1976)
- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “Introduction: Rhizome” and excerpt from “1227: Treatise on Nomadology:—the War Machine” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980)
- Aragorn Eloff, “Children of the new Earth – Deleuze, Guattari and anarchism” (2015)
Week 14: Communists Like Us
- Felix Guattari and Toni Negri, Communists Like Us: New Spaces of Liberty, New Lines of Alliance (1990)
Week 15: Empire and Multitude
- Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, introduction to Empire (2000) and “Democracy of the Multitude” from Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004)
Week 16: A Communist “Form-of-Life”?
- Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics (2000)
- Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War (2010)
Week 17: Spread Anarchy, Live Communism
- The Invisible Committee, “Spread Anarchy, Live Communism” (2011)
- The Invisible Committee, “Get Going!” “Find Each Other,” “Get Organized,” and “Insurrection,” from The Coming Insurrection (2007)
- The Invisible Committee, chapters 2 and 5-8 from To Our Friends (2014)
- The Invisible Committee, chapters 2-4 and 7 from Now (2017)
