May 28 in Montreal: Fire and Flames Book Launch

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"Earlier, many of us saw themselves as anarchists, Spontis, or communists, while some had vague, individual ideas about a liberated life. Then we all became Autonome."


Monday, May 28 at 7PM
La Belle Epoque
1984 Wellington


Black blocs, squats, riots and urban guerillas - but also base groups in the factories, "free spaces", antinuclear occupations, and alternative lifestylism - all of these formed the context, the terrain, and the world of Germany's Autonomous movement during its high point in the 1980s. Today best known for the militant street fighting tactics they exemplified, the Autonomen opposed the capitalist State while purposefully not putting forward any kind of blueprint for what would replace it, an ethos summed up in the slogan, "No power to no one!"

The challenges faced by the Autonomen - repression from the police, integration from the reformist left - and the way in which they were met, provide a look forward to what may face our own movements in the time to come. As the current capitalist crisis leads to new surges in protest, with radical elements try to break out of the reformist structures and defeatist traditions meant to hold us back, Germany in the 1980s doesn't seem so far away.

Fire and Flames was the first comprehensive study of the German autonomous movement ever published. Released in 1990, it reached its fifth edition by 1997, with the legendary German Konkret journal concluding that "the movement had produced its own classic." This is the first english translation ever published.

The author, writing under the pseudonym of Geronimo, has been an Autonomous activist since the movement burst onto the scene in the early 80s. His book is not an academic study, but a movement history produced by a participant in the events, for all of us engaged in building resistance to capitalism, and fighting for a liberatory future.

This book launch will include a brief overview of the Fire and Flames as well as several readings from the book, and a brief presentation about how the German movement responded to repression similar to what is happening today in Montreal. This will hopefully be followed by a discussion of how this relates to current struggles occurring here today. A short film will also be shown.

Whisper translation between english and french will be provided.
Refreshments will be served.

Copies of Fire and Flames will be available at the discounted price of $16 (normal price is $20)

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From The Memory Vault: Autonomous Theses 1981

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From Fire and Flames: A History of the German Autonomist movement, recently published by PM Press:

In 1981, some autonomous activists who attended a meeting in Padua, Italy, formulated eight theses that tried to capture the most common characteristics of the diverse crowd of activists that had begun to call themselves "Autonome." The theses were never formalized, and different revised and updated versions have appeared - for example, in radikal no. 97 extra (August 1981) and in the 1995 reader Der Stand der Bewegung - but to this day the straightforward convictions and sentiments listed in the original paper remain at the core of autonomous identity, even if every single one of them has been passionately discussed and, at times, decidedly rejected by parts of the movement.

1. We fight for ourselves and others fight for themselves. However, connecting our struggles makes us all stronger. We do not engage in "representative struggles." Our activities are based on our own affectedness, "politics of the first person." We do not fight for ideology, or for the proletariat, or for "the people." We fight for a self-determined life in all aspects of our existence, knowing that we can only be free if all are free.

2. We do not engage in dialogue with those in power! We only formulate demands. Those in power can heed them or not.

3. We have not found one another at the workplace. Engaging in wage labor is an exception for us. We have found one another through punk, the "scene," and the subculture we move in.

4. We all embrace a "vague anarchism" but we are not anarchists in a traditional sense. Some of us see communism/Marxism as an ideology of order and domination - an ideology that supports the state while we reject it. Others believe in an "original" communist idea that has been distorted. All of us, however, have great problems with the term "communism" due to the experiences with the K-groups [West Germany's Maoist parties, analagous to the North American New Communist Movement], East Germany, etc.

5. No power to no one! This also means "no power to the workers," "no power to the people," and "no counterpower." No power to no one!

6. Our ideas are very different from those of the alternative movement, but we use the alternative movement’s infrastructure. We are aware that capitalism is using the alternative scene to create a new cycle of capital and labor, both by providing employment for unemployed youth and as a testing field for solving economic problems and pacifying social tensions.

7. We are uncertain whether we want a revolt or a revolution. Some want a "permanent revolution," but others say that this wouldn’t be any different from a "permanent revolt." Those who mistrust the term "revolution" think it suggests freedom to be realized at a certain point in time, while they don’t believe that this is possible. According to them, 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.

8. We have no organization per se. Our forms of organization are all more or less spontaneous. There are squatters’ councils, telephone chains, autonomous assemblies, and many, many small groups. Short-term groups form to carry out an action or to attend a protests. Long-term groups form to work on continuous projects like radikal, Radio Utopia, or very illegal actions. There aren’t any more solid structures than that, no parties and the like, and there is no hierarchy either.

There will be a Montreal book launch of Fire and Flames, with a discussion about the book and the relevance of the German experience to what is going on today, next Monday, May 28, at 7pm at La Belle Epoque (1984 Wellington). Here is the facebook event page.

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Can't Stop the Kaos: A Brief History of the Black Bloc

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Excellent news, comrades - at a time when inquiring minds want to know, the folks at Autonomous Resistance have delivered the goods, producing this snappy little pamphlet history of the Black Bloc in europe and north amerika.

You can download Can't Stop the Kaos from their site, or mirrored here.

Read. Discuss. Apply.

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The Sculpture of Exception: The Black Bloc's Interactive Art at the Toronto G20

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The Sculpture of Exception: The Black Bloc's Interactive Art at the Toronto G20 from brandon jourdan on Vimeo.

Beka Economopoulos, a member of the Brooklyn-based group Not An Alternative, interprets a moving sculpture by artists at the Toronto G20 using the “Black Bloc” method of sculpting. The piece entitled “The Sculpture of Exception,” ironically turns political theorist Carl Schmitt’s “state of exception” on its head. The state of exception, according to Schmitt, frees the executive from any legal restraints to its power that would normally apply in a given crisis situation or any situation where power needs self-legitimization.

“The Sculpture of Exception” illustrates that collective bodies can also operate outside legal restraints when governments perpetuate crisis through capital consolidation and austerity. The piece draws attention to the possibilities for refusal and non-compliance in the face of such given force and shows a dialectic that forms within this context.

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Deepening Resistance, Upping the Anti

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Upping the Anti is a radical journal, weaving together strands of non-party Marxism and grassroots anti-authoritarian praxis with some very interesting results. Here is how i describe it in my new catalog:

Upping the Anti #3 (November 2006 - 184 pages) The most recent issue of this radical journal from Canada includes interviews with Aijaz Ahmad (“The Anti-Imperialism of our Times”) and William Robinson (“Latin America vs. Global Capitalism”), articles by AK Thompson (“Making Friends With Failure” - thoughts about Richard Day’s book Gramsci Is Dead), Isabel MacDonald (“Haiti: Adventures in Colonialism”), RJ Maccani (“The Zapatistas: Enter the Intergalactic”) and Jen Plyler (“How To Keep On Keeping On” about sustainable modes of long-term community activism). Also, a fascinating roundtable discussion about the struggle at Six Nations and the possibilities and limitations of non-indigenous solidarity. Book reviews of Sociology for Changing the World (Caelie Frampton et al.), Outlaws of America (Dan Berger) and Autobiography of a Blue-Eyed Devil: My life and times in a racist, imperialist society (Inga Muscio).

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Like issues one and two, UTA3 contains interviews with movement intellectuals (some “organic,” some academic), articles by activists, and “roundtable discussions” with comrades involved in contemporary radical politics across Canada. It’s a winning combination, with the interviews and roundtables especially providing an accessible format for dealing with some very important issues, ranging from theory to practice and back again. Certainly not an academic publication (that’s a compliment btw), Upping the Anti is well written and touches on complex questions, providing much food for thought.

Issue number three starts off with a thoughtful editorial, Growing Pains: The Anti-Globalization Movement, Anti-Imperialism and the Politics of the United Front – an analysis of the state of the movement and then some. The authors do a good job at summarizing the “anti-globalization moment” of 1997-2001, and examining the differences between politics at that time and the anti-war movement today. More than just a trip down memory lane, this is an ambitious text, one which stakes out positions and tries to define terms.

The most useful part, for me, was how Growing Pains explores the tension between the “pedagogy of confrontation” (associated with the anti-globalization movement) and the politics of “the united front” (associated with the anti-war movement today). To discuss this properly would require a separate post, but to (greatly) summarize, the pedagogy of confrontation involves more aggressive tactics and politics aimed at empowering people and getting results, as “people will be moved to action once it is demonstrated that action is both possible and effective.” (35) The united front, on the other hand, is concerned with not alienating less radical people, pursuing “minimum demands while at the same time arguing against the limitations of the minimal platform.” (34)

It’s a good lens through which to examine movements, more fruitful (at the present time) than either the anarchist/socialist or reformist/revolutionary ones.

That said, Growing Pains seems to stretch a little too far, proposing that we need to transcend the “politics of responsibility to the Other” and use “dialectical images” as a way of moving forwards. While i agree with some of what i understood, it felt like the argument should have either been pared down or else given an extra few pages to fully explain what the authors mean. As it is, the logic seems a bit too fast and some of the examples a bit too easy, leaving this reader unsure if he had understood everything that was being said.

A good beginning nevertheless. Even if - or perhaps especially because – one may have to read it a few times to grasp what is being said. Editorials are often bland little things where the people behind a publication fly their flag and pretend to be important, indulging in their favourite platitudes – Growing Pains is several cuts above that.

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In previous issues the best parts of Upping the Anti were the interviews and roundtables, and #3 is no exception.

UTA3 features interviews with Aijaz Ahmad and William I. Robinson, each of whom discuss different questions pertaining to different parts of the world, but nevertheless return to some common concerns. I’m not sure if this was the intention of the UTA crew or just happy happenstance, but they work well side by side.

Ahmad, a leading Marxist academic from the Indian subcontinent, defends the need for a revolutionary party, argues that communists should immerse themselves in practical struggles responding to the needs of the oppressed, and briefly describes the different factions within right-wing anti-imperialist Islam. There is a lot going on here, and this interview could have easily been twice as long – as it stands parts of it feel more like a tease than anything else... (lucky me, i notice a local library has several of Ahmad’s books...)

Robinson’s interview is less far-ranging, focusing on the “turn to the left” in Latin America and the nature of global capitalism. Like Ahmad, Robinson argues that revolutionaries should not abandon the struggle for State power, while stressing that it is only because of the extra-parliamentary pressure from the masses that even “progressive” governments are enabled (or forced?) to stand up to global capitalism. Particularly interesting was his discussion of capital’s separation from the nation-state, and the strategic importance of indigenous struggles today – though again, each could have been discussed in quite a bit more detail.

If both of these interviews touch upon the question of the State, it would be misleading to pretend that this is a preoccupation of the journal as a whole. UTA is clearly situated within the non-party radical left, and i understand these dialogues as being a positive byproduct of an ongoing openness to the experiences and lessons of intelligent people, regardless of their precise tendency.

While the interviews with Ahmad and Robinson were very interesting, the Six Nations Roundtable is probably the most important part of UTA3, as a document from a struggle actually going on within/against Canada today. As readers of this blog will know, the people of Six Nations have been involved in a historic struggle to reclaim their land along the Grand River, a struggle which has had as its flashpoint the settler town of Caledonia, where this year Six Nations people managed to put a stop to real estate development on their land through a ten-month occupation.

UTA3’s Six Nations section starts out with a summary by Tom Keefer of the situation at the Kanenhstaton (Protected Place) reclamation site, providing an overview of what this struggle is about and what has happened, both during the “hot points” (a massive police raid, racist settler rallies, etc.) and the less dramatic day-to-day.

This is followed by an interview with Degunohdohgae (Brian Skye), a member of the Cayuga Nation who explains the significance of the Reclamation within the struggle against Canadian colonialism. Degunohdohgae also describes the positive role of solidarity from non-indigenous people.

It is this question of solidarity which constitutes the real focus of the entire Roundtable. Which is an honest thing to do, as UTA is a not an indigenous journal, but one mainly written by and directed towards the settler left. So the rest of the Roundtable consists of an interview with Jan Watson, a white woman from Caledonia who has been active in organizing against the rise of racism in the settler community, and with three members of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty.

It is the discussion with OCAP members that is particularly interesting, as these are anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian activists – people from the same broad tendency as UTA – discussing their own perceived strengths and weaknesses in regards to providing solidarity with Six Nations.

The question of solidarity, what it means and what its limitations are, is one which has been grappled with for years by comrades in North America. It has been of particular saliency to white activists, as so many of the heaviest struggles do not obviously involve us, and so many of us find ourselves more often in the position of “privileged outsider” than actual protagonist. The middle class complexion of the white left combined with the retreat of feminism and queer liberation onto the terrain of cultural politics just exacerbates this situation. And when we have gotten solidarity wrong, we have sometimes done more damage than the State itself...

So while these issues are addressed in relationship to events at Six Nations, there are some lessons here that will be familiar to many.

For instance, i can certainly relate to this observation by A.J. Withers:

It is very challenging as an outsider to negotiate the need for me to be in my place as a supporter and still be myself. In the beginning I acted very differently than I do now as I increasingly feel confident in myself and my actions. My desire to be pleasing when I first started going meant that I actually behaved poorly. Because I was afraid I would offend someone. I wasn’t as honest as I could have been, even when I was being asked for my opinion. That wasn’t fair to anyone. (161)

Many of us have struggled with this racist tendency to tailor ourselves to what we think people want us to be, making ourselves in fact disingenuous allies. Which is no way to be a real ally at all.

The discussion with OCAP folk has a refreshing lack of defensiveness, and participants seem to share a sincere desire to be honest about the racist errors that solidarity activists so often stumble into. Here is another useful observation Withers makes:

It is important to remember that we [non-native supporters] are not and never will be the central players in this movement. Solidarity work is not in itself liberatory, only the struggles of the people directly affected will see their liberation.

I think that it is key that we take leadership from native people and that we ensure that we are taking it from the people, not a few people. It isn’t hard, in a community of a few thousand, to find someone to tell you what you want to hear and call that leadership. It is hard to try and figure out what an actual community wants and do that. (163)

Of course, this in itself is not a perfect response. After all, “the community” is rarely monolithic. Acting on behalf of “the community” can translate into acting on behalf of those who have more power or prestige and have hegemony, rather than those whose struggle bears with it the greatest potential for liberation.

In certain situations the correct thing for revolutionaries to do is not to respect the wishes of the majority, but to ally with those people we have the most in common with, even though they may only be a minority.

I am not talking specifically about Six Nations here, nor am i talking about intervening in other people’s societies – in fact regardless of our alliances, i think we definitely should not intervene to boost those we consider the “most revolutionary” – but the basis of our alliance should go beyond simple solidarity. It should be based on a shared position of struggle, and with that grounding it should be with those whose struggles intersect with our own. With an eye to spotting class differences, and pushing against the capitalist grain that keeps our perspective pointed upwards, we must turn our sight to the most oppressed.

This kind of politics, which in bygone days would have been called “internationalism,” is clearly reflected in several things the OCAP comrades had to say. For instance, quoting Withers again:

The obvious connection to OCAP’s anti-poverty work is that a lot of Native people are poor, especially in the cities. [...] More than being about poverty, though, connecting anti-poverty and Native rights movements is about building resistance. Aside from there being a lot of poor Natives, poor people and First Nations people have a great deal in common in regards to our issues, struggles and repression we face. (156)

Or as Josh Zucker recalls:

I remember the first conversation I had with anyone at the reclamation site was about welfare rates. It was the first day I was there and I was talking with a man named John about when he lived on the streets in Toronto. He told me point blank that we should be fighting to get the welfare rates raised in Toronto and so we talked a bit about the OCAP “Raise the Rates” campaign. The connection is obvious. Native people live in extreme poverty unknown in many other communities across the country. (156-7)

As Stefanie Gude explains:

Our relationship to supporting indigenous struggle, as an organization, is centered on our own struggle against the government, for welfare, disability, housing, access to health care – a fight for respect and dignity, against poverty and oppression. (160)

Finally, Gude reminds us that:

Non-native activists need to understand that indigenous struggle will never be won because of the actions of settlers. We need to understand our responsibility to fight the racism and power on the settler side, which may not be the most glamorous or exciting part of the fight, but a part of it only we can and should do. Many people who spent time at the site or who came together to plan support for the reclamation here in Toronto are rooted in struggles of their own. This is one of the reasons why we came together, because we are already fighting. This is also one of the reasons why it is hard, albeit crucial, to support the six Nations peoples. You can’t drop your own fight – because it is exactly that which grounds you and offers one way to understand why indigenous struggle is so crucial and what your role supporting it should be.  (167)

These are all important points, positions which are the product of past generations of struggle. They don’t add up to anything particularly complicated or awe-inspiring, just a basic call to work within one’s own community, wherever that might be, and to use one’s grounding there as a basis for forging alliances with other people in struggle.

My one criticism of the Six Nations section as a whole is that, given its focus on solidarity, it could have benefited from a summary of what forms solidarity has taken. The roundtable format has important strengths, but because of its emphasis on subjective experience it is best tempered with more “objective” informational piece. This would make it easier to see how some of the self-criticisms advanced by the interviewees played out in concrete ways. References are made to spending too much time at the cookhouse, and insufficient ties to First Nations people in Toronto (where OCAP is based, 100km from the Reclamation site), but for people from other communities who have not followed this struggle closely, the relevance of this may not be clear.

Given that this section is a good historical document that comrades could learn from in future struggles, it should be noted that this shortcoming will be only grow in importance as time goes on. In this vein, i would recommend for instance Tom Keefer’s article Caledonia's fifth column: white anti-racism in solidarity with Six Nations which appeared in the August 2006 issue of Briarpatch magazine, which provides a good deal of background information and context to the debates around solidarity with Six Nations.

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Upping The Anti continues to be a welcome source of ideas for North American, and specifically Canadian, activists... and i haven’t even mentioned the articles about Canadian imperialism in Haiti, about the Zapatistas, or about sustainable habits of activism – perhaps in a future post!

If you are in Canada you can order Upping the Anti directly from Autonomy & Solidarity, anybody can order it from Kersplebedeb for $13 US postage included:

Wholesale rates available – please contact info@kersplebedeb.com for details!

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[Italy] Terraces and Peripheries: Left snobbery and the radical right

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The following is an interesting article about the influence of far right ideology on the Italian working class. I’m reposting it here (i first spotted it on the aut-op-sy list) as the dynamic described by Quadrelli is not limited to the European scene. In North America too, despite some differences from the European class structure, the rise of the far right can be traced to the left’s disconnection from the working class.

The person who posted this to aut-op-sy explains that “The text appears in German translation in issue 77 of 'Wildcat', although it's not online yet as it's still the current issue. It was written by Emilio Quadrelli, a Genova-based researcher who has spent years insisting (from first-hand experience on many levels) on the inseparability of developments in the class structure of work, prison, 'crime' and political insurrection. (The original Italian text doesn't seem to be online anywhere; if anyone wants it please contact the English translator at .)”

A note from Sketchy Thoughts: i believe most of us here in North America would use the term “suburbs” rather than peripheries.

Terraces & peripheries. Left snobbery & the radical right

If anyone still had any doubts much has happened to dispel them. Many of the terraces of the Italian football stadiums are controlled to an increasing degree by the radical right. This is a fact. And it is necessary to start from here to attack, politically and not morally, a phenomenon which has been spreading for some time in metropolitan peripheries and which only becomes worthy of attention when it gains heavy media visibility. Only in the presence of swastikas, celtic crosses or explicit holocaust references dominating stadiums are many people stupefied, as if they were in a remake of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, and they forget at least a thing or two.

First, they [i.e. the fans associated with the radical right] don't come from the moon, they also have a social life outside the stadiums, lived quite coherently with the 'values' expressed on the terraces. In other words, adherence to the nazi 'lifestyle' is not something purely symbolic and extemporaneous, adopted in a framework where carnival prevails, but a total and in many cases totalizing 'lifestyle', with effects on everyday life. The second thing is the consent and legitimation which – without any kind of forcing, it should be noted – they can claim across areas which cannot necessarily be reductively described as belonging to the world of the radical right.

To speak only of the Roman situation, it is worth recalling the 'dead boy' derby match. This spurious story was circulated by some hardcore fringe fans, regarded by the 'experts' as marginal, isolated from the rest of the crowd, but it immediately became the unquestionable truth for the whole stadium. Essentially the story accused the security forces of killing a young boy during the baton charge that preceded the match. The denial by senior officers and by the highest municipal authorities met with a long deafening, chorus of 'shame, shame' (from Lazio and Roma fans alike), which left little room for interpretation and showed that, when it came to choosing between the institutional truth and the illegitimate truth of 'small groups' of 'unruly fans' the whole stadium showed little doubt about which side it was on. And this is only one of many episodes which could be cited. Posing a few questions, then, seems legitimate to say the least.

As they are not aliens, the 'stadium extremists' do not come from outer space, they inhabit urban areas which are not particularly hard to identify: the peripheries. For the left, this should pose a problem. Why have the traditional urban environments of the left suddenly become the ideal breeding grounds for the radical right? Why are the 'culture' and the 'lifestyle' of 'fascist subversion' able to become hegemonic to a large extent in the stadiums and, to a lesser extent, in the peripheries? Perhaps there are 'deep' explanations that require particularly acute insight, but, even when restricted to the 'surface', it is possible to say something. Passing through any periphery, we enter into a desolate panorama which, to put it bluntly, confirms the lack of interest and the unattractiveness of these territories which, a bit hurriedly in the wake of the latest sociologisms, have been assigned to the world of non-places. The prosaic fact that millions of people live there is regarded at best as a mere nuisance, a simple residue or the undesired collateral effect of the postmodern era. But what is so unpresentable about the inhabitants of the peripheries? What faults mark them like the indelible mark of original sin? Plenty to tell the truth. If they work they do low-status manual jobs; 'productive' or 'unproductive' is not a difference that matters very much. For the most part, moreover, when they don't work, instead of contributing to the oh-so-fashionable world of 'post-work' they plunge into the prosaic condition of the unemployed, revealing once more, if that were necessary, the '20th century' residue they always carry with them. But they don't stop there, dated and unpresentable though these conditions already are. In more than a few cases they devote themselves to illegal activities. And once again in this case they show little sign of participating in the contemporary world. Instead of dedicating themselves to illegal practices which are at least respectable as trends, such as computer piracy, they steal, rob, deal drugs, etc. In a word, they don't manage to be cognitive or immaterial in anything, not even in crime. And when, as often happens, together with a few other million individuals they put on a 'blue collar' and every day confront Capital on the terrain of the 'working day', perhaps imagining themselves still to have, if not an historic role then at least a social one, the latest new philosopher rushes to tell them they should stop worrying because, although maybe they haven't noticed, in reality they no longer exist. Not only that: it's often explained that the search for a strong identity is historically obsolete and, objectively speaking, a reactionary operation, because it inhibits the subversive element which, perhaps in spite of itself, the global capitalist era has put into circulation: the age of the individual. But playing as an individual requires the possibility of being one. A dimension which to large swathes of the population can only be denied.

In the global era, as in any other great transformation, if someone wins, someone else can only lose. If many, through still a minority, are enabled by the opportunities global capitalism offers to free themselves from all restrictions (although as Carosone would say, this opportunity almost always depends on mummy's purse) and to assume the light identity of the free individual in the free market, for most life's expectations look quite different. Their destiny can only be that of the perpetually marginal. And that is the only plaintive 'identity' permitted to them.

What does the right offer these masses without history and without future? Not much, to tell the truth. It offers them a collective glue, which, unfashionable as it may be, is still something. Above all it offers them an enemy. The elites, who can regard with cynical and ironic detachment the hold which the conceptual pairing 'friend/enemy' has on the world, are the sole exception: for the majority, those excluded from the gilded world of individuals, the enemy continues to be the indispensable element able to define the 'strong' borders of friendship. To put it simply, the radical right directs the hate of the peripheries towards something 'concrete'. It offers an identity and a hope. In essence, they say: if we are reduced to this today, it is their fault, the inhabitants of the 'centre', who have the money, the means and the power and use it against us. But we will not submit any more. We exist and they will have to take notice soon.

History is always moved by an 'us' which is counterposed to a 'them'; it never escapes from this dimension. The radical right, on the peripheries, concocts a tailor-made 'us' which in some way is able to turn hate into an identity and a project. Certainly it can be objected that all this is laughable and grotesque, but it must always be borne in mind that choices are made on the basis of what is concretely available. And on the peripheries there do not seem to be any alternatives. Through no merit of its own, simply because it has no rivals, the radical right unexpectedly finds itself in a monopoly on the peripheries. It is well known that, for a long time, the left has abandoned friend/enemy rhetoric, opting for 'visions of the world' where the philosophy of 'benevolence' prevails. Moreover, having without qualms adopted the cause of individuals, the left cannot help but show itself to be distant from the anonymous masses of the peripheries. A snobbish attitude which, however confusedly, the anonymous masses perceive. These worlds receive very little attention, aside from small realities where political militants have been unafraid of contamination with the 'base instincts of the people', as in the case of the Livorno football fans, who are regarded by the left as pure folklore. And what is true of the terraces is even more true of the gyms, another instance where the nazi 'lifestyle' has easily achieved a kind of hegemony. In this case too, an ill-concealed intellectualism has consigned these worlds to the realm of 'bare life', which everyone knows there is no reason to take any notice of. A space which the radical right has not done much to occupy, and on which it would be worth the effort to work, even just to investigate.

In its renunciation of everything, the left has ended up regarding it as inappropriate to maintain any kind of organic link with the 'people', who by definition are not (and never have been) very presentable in sophisticated settings, whether economic or intellectual. The result, as everyone who takes the trouble to do the least work on the ground will easily find out, is quite depressing. In the peripheries, the left is perceived, without too many fine distinctions, as one of the various faces of the 'centre', people who come from outside, who live a gilded life out there (or so it seems) in the world of inclusion, of individuals, of post-work and post-something, but who have nothing to do with those for whom every day is a struggle.

This impression is not far from the truth if, for example, we take a look at the isolation in which the revolt in the French peripheries was left last autumn. The biggest and most powerful insurgency from below of the age of global capitalism, at least in the West, was instantly liquidated by the left, when it wasn't stigmatized as a pure cry of pain and desperation from the beggars of the République. That said, despite the far from idyllic situation, a lot of people are taking notice of the urgency and the need to return to occupy the proper spaces of the left and of antifascism. If from this point of view the Livorno fans can be regarded as the reality which has best been able to guarantee a militant and antifascist presence within the stadiums (and not just there), other realities, though objectively smaller, nonetheless exist, and in the present climate this is by no means insignificant. At the end of this summary, perhaps what it makes sense to propose is that experiences like these be socialized across a wider network, so that they become the common property of all those realities (in a minority but still present in a large part of the world discussed here) for whose existence antifascism and class struggle for socialism continues to be an indispensable reference point.

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Talking About A Revolution: Reading Richard Day's Gramsci Is Dead

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Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements
ISBN 0745321127
Pluto Press 2006

In Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements, Richard Day of Queens University argues for a supposedly “new” kind of radical activism, one which is neither revolutionary nor reformist. He describes this “new” activism as “non-hegemonic” and his own theory as “post-anarchist”.

While the book deals with questions of ethics vs. morality, post-structuralism, identity politics and more, what interests me most – and what i will focus on here – is the question of revolution, which we are told to abandon.

Let’s see if we can make some sense of this, shall we?

(you may want to read my previous posting on Richard Day’s Montreal talk about Gramsci Is Dead as background to this posting - also please note that this entire discussion is available for easier reading as a PDF file.)

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Affinity vs. Hegemony
Gramsci Is Dead is all about differentiating between two modes of political activism: the “hegemony of hegemony” and the “logic of affinity”.

According to Richard Day, hegemonic changes “(1) are to be felt over an entire social space, usually a nation-state, and (2) are expected to occur across a wide spectrum – indeed, the widest spectrum possible – of social, political, cultural, and economic structures and processes.” (65) As Day explained when he spoke in Montreal last month, hegemonic (or revolutionary) strategies rely on offensive force (i.e. violence, and not just in self-defense) and involve “organizing others” in order to realize their “grand schemes”.

(Day also claims that privileging one form of oppression as being more important than all others is an aspect of hegemonic thinking. Class is the example most often used. While this is an important question, and one perhaps related to the rest of Day’s anti-hegemonic thesis, it is not tied in so tightly as to directly relate to the question of revolution that I am choosing to focus on here. Perhaps another post on another day, huh?)

Opposing hegemony, Day suggests that radicals adopt a “logic of affinity” – in fact he looks to the anti-globalization movement and claims that activists have already been doing so. Rejecting hegemonic goals and the belief that there is one fundamental form of oppression, the logic of affinity recognizes that “as individuals and members of communities, [we] must free ourselves, in an effort that cannot be expected to terminate in a final event of revolution.” (127) The “logic of affinity” requires us to concentrate on setting up alternative structures, combating oppression within these structures and then reaching out to others in solidarity.

If affinity does not lead to revolution or other “totalizing” transformations, it can nevertheless be effective at radically changing society. Borrowing from Martin Buber, Day refers to such “non-revolutionary non-reformist” change as “structural renewal”.

So far so good, and yet it remains difficult to grapple with this, because Day seems to vacillate between different possible implications of what the “logic of affinity” might entail. Much of the time, Gramsci Is Dead seems willing to push things as far as they will go, bravely rejecting any and all hegemonic goals or strategies. One is left with a romantic, futuristic vision of “packs” (as opposed to classes or movements) carrying out small-scale experiments “under the radar”, embracing that “incoherence within the ranks of those who oppose the neo-liberal order, each for their own reasons.” (152) “The figures of the hacker, the monkeywrencher and the invisible hero of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler… all come to mind.” (174)

Occasionally though, you can hear something else poke through, as when Day protests that “I am not advocating total rejection of reformist or revolutionary programs in all cases […Rather, I am] arguing that non-hegemonic strategies and tactics need to be explored more fully than has so far been the case.” (215)

This is a critical distinction. How really opposed to “hegemony” is Day? Does Gramsci Is Dead propose to reject the old hegemonic paradigm, or is it merely a call for us to supplement it with “affinitive” tactics? This question makes all the difference in the world…

I have chosen to respond to Day’s arguments as if they are intended as an outright rejection of hegemony. Throughout his book there seems to be a consistent argument against hegemonic goals, which are described as being fundamentally opposed to the logic of affinity, and intrinsically authoritarian. I recognize that he does also point in other directions – including several positive examples of “hybrid” projects – and I accept the possibility that I may be misreading him (indeed, I hope that this is the case!) – nevertheless, for an argument to be coherent it must be interpreted in one way or another… and Day’s book does seem predicated on this wholesale rejection of hegemony.

Revolutionaries
Gramsci Is Dead spends quite a bit of ink tracing the history of hegemonic ideas, from Hegel on. Leninists and bourgeois reformists will find themselves rejected as intrinsically authoritarian, subjected to the standard anarchist critique of any and all Statist programmes.

One might expect Day to really test his argument on anarchists, for as he is forced to admit, many of these make claim to being both revolutionary and completely opposed to “state-centred models of social change”. As such, a credible revolutionary anarchist position would seem to disprove Gramsci Is Dead’s entire argument.

Effectively answering this challenge, Gramsci Is Dead includes an interesting chapter on utopian socialists and anarchists, in which two different tendencies – one hegemonizing (i.e. revolutionary) and one affinitive (i.e. non-revolutionary) – are teased out of 19th and early 20th century circle-a thought. As he puts it, “the logic of affinity has been always already present in anarchism, […] it has existed as a counter-pole to the tantalizing revolutionary urge that dominated not only anarchist socialism, but every other political ideology of the modern era as well.” (95)

Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876) emerges as the “hegemonic” anarchist par excellence, and yet in criticizing him Day basically takes him to task for being a vanguardist. His point seems to be that were Bakunin (or subsequent anarchist revolutionaries) to succeed in smashing the State, they would be faced with the same challenges as Leninists, and could be expected to make similar decisions…

Day identifies what he considers to be a non-revolutionary anarchist tradition emerging with Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) and then more clearly still with Gustav Landauer (1870-1919). Despite an interesting overview of Landauer’s political ideas, i feel that Day exaggerates the evidence of an actual “affinitive” anarchist tradition. Not only is his case regarding Kropotkin (described as “the first postanarchist to begin to emerge out of the modernist quagmires of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century socialism” (123)) very weak, but he ignores the fact that the vast majority of historical anarchists (including Kropotkin, as Day himself acknowledges) insisted that their goals were revolutionary (i.e. hegemonic). As a coherent tendency “affinitive, non-hegemonic anarchism” seems to be at most a promise or potential within historical anarchism, if even that…

In regards to revolution tout court, Day’s key objection goes beyond the anti-vanguardist critique he aims at Bakunin and the Leninists, but is instead based on an extreme anti-authoritarianism which opposes anybody coercing anyone. Take for instance the following quote, shocking in its implications:

We cannot wait for ‘everyone’ to choose to live in non-statist, non-capitalist relationships, or we will very likely wait forever. Nor can we force socialism on anyone, since that would violate our commitment to respecting the autonomy of individuals and groups. (126)

This goes far beyond simply objecting to Statism – the above paragraph raises the bar so high (in regards to not forcing socialism on anyone, including one assumes the bourgeoisie!) that one is left wondering what, if anything, we can do to change the way anything works?

Day gives us a poor answer: “there is no choice for those of us who desire to live differently but to begin to do so ourselves.” (126) Clearly this is unsatisfactory, as “beginning to live differently ourselves” may cover “constructing alternatives” without any “violation of autonomy”, but little else.

In fairness, despite the fact that Day sometimes seems to contradict himself, he does provide us with clues as to what the “logic of affinity” would entail. He claims that it would allow for “conscious attempts to alter, impede, destroy or construct alternatives to dominant structures, processes, practices and identities.” (4) Plus, he specifically refers to indigenous struggles, “non-branded tactics” (by which he means tactics that “work” but which nobody “owns”, like Independent Media Centres or Food Not Bombs), intentional communities, the Zapatistas and People’s Global Action as all being affinitive experiments.

In other words: people who share certain beliefs should act on them when appropriate, but without having any larger “totalizing” imperatives to bring about any global change (that would be hegemonic). Through such actions we will help usher in the “coming communities” which will be based on “shared ethico-political commitments that allow us to achieve enough solidarity to effectively create sustainable alternatives to the neoliberal order.” (186)

To the degree that these “coming communities” will alter, impede or destroy bits of the system, one assumes it will simply in the way of self-defense – i.e. to protect their own autonomy – not as part of any offensive logic.

The State and Other Bad Things
Day’s rejection of hegemonic change (either revolutionary or reformist) is the result of how he understands the State and other structures of domination:

Landauer insisted that the state is a condition, a certain sort of relationship. […] In analyzing the state as a set of relationships among subjects Landauer grasped the key insight of Foucault’s governmentality thesis – that we are not governed by ‘institutions’ apart from ourselves, by a ‘state’ set over against a ‘civil society’. Rather we all govern each other via a complex set of capillary relations of power. (124-5; italics in the original)

It is because he considers the State to be everywhere in everyone that Day rejects hegemonic solutions as ineffective. Even if they destroy a particular institution or oppressive structure, they will not be able to abolish the State itself, because the State is everywhere – even (especially?) within the hegemonic revolutionaries themselves. At worst such solutions lead to totalitarianism; at best, they represent a blind alley: “while we might rid ourselves of particular states, we can never rid ourselves of the state form. It is always already with us, and so must be consistently and carefully warded off.” (140)

Indeed, not only is the State “always with us” as a potential, but as a potential which most people are likely to prefer. Even in cases where a State might collapse, “as has happened so many times before, very few people would be ready to accept a life of non-domination and non-exploitation – most would seek new masters, and a few would try to accommodate them.” (34)

This pessimistic vision owes a lot to Foucault, but its greater debt is to Christianity. Consider for instance this approving passage: “Foucault sees that within each of us as individuals, and within any group, there is a potential for things to go ether way, or to go both ways at once.” (137) Every soul can be saved, any soul can be lost… good and evil existing as potentials that each person can choose, either resisting Satan’s (the State’s?) temptations or giving into them. This flows right into that Christian idea of personal salvation, or every person being able to save their own soul. God deals with us on a case by case basis, he is loving and fair, so do good (act in a non-Statist way) and he will be pleased.

To say that this Landauer/Foucault/Day conception is also a very Christian one is not meant to discredit it, or to be a snotty put-down. These ideas are useful (which is why they were adopted by the Church, the original capitalist think tank, one that “thinks in centuries”) but on their own they are inadequate. They are one dimension of politics, but not the whole thing. Which is why the Church has always paid so much attention to what people think and do in their personal lives, while at the same time doing all it can to use coercive, hegemonic institutions like the State to order society.

(i should mention that Landauer was in fact inspired by elements of anti-authoritarian Jewish mysticism, not Christianity – a subject ignored by Day, but which would be interesting to examine at some future date…of this subject see the book Future Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age, by Russell Jacoby)

Mesmerized by the “capillary” ubiquitous existence of power, some people miss the point that as complex as it may be, there are still significant differences between different forms of domination. Between, if you will, the “cop in your head” and the cop in the street. Analyzing and combating “capillary” forms of domination is important – that’s a key insight of many different liberation movements, most notably the women’s movement – but “analysis” means measuring, studying, understanding something. What doing so reveals are distinct mechanisms of power and exploitation, linked in a particular fashion. Not a web so fine that we should throw up our hands, admit it is too complex to be understood, and simply say “it’s all equally bad” and move on!

This vision of seamless domination – too complex and microscopic to measure – underlies much of Day’s critique. Really, it is an unwillingness to see quantitative changes as ever becoming qualitative, of saying “this is worst than that” or “this is of critical importance” or “this is bad, but it’s not going to change until we tackle this larger problem”. It is an ahistorical vision, which closes its eyes to the fact that capitalism did not spread over the world by simply “percolating into everyday relations” (124), but rather required violent, dramatic, hegemonic struggles in which a particular class (the bourgeoisie) gained power, and in which most of the world was conquered.

The one place where Day seems to acknowledge that qualitatively different kinds of domination exist is when dealing with the differences between the First and Third Worlds. One gets the feeling that this is his way of justifying his enthusiasm for certain Third World struggles which often violate the limits of a pure logic of affinity. Yet a historical analysis of how capitalism, patriarchy and the State form spread across the globe shows these asymmetrical realities have a common point of origin, and that the only thing that could have put imperialism in check would have been a hegemonic event of one sort or another – either revolution in Europe or the defeat and smashing of the new settler states in the colonies.

Is this to say that there was no “percolating”, “capillary” side to the imperialist plague? Of course not. The way in which capitalism and patriarchy ensnared and seduced ambitious male classes around the world is well documented – it is what made the European conquest of the world so devastating, as it corrupted and transformed every culture and nation it came in contact with. (See Butch Lee’s The Military Strategy of Women and Children or Jailbreak Out Of History: the re-biography of Harriet Tubman, Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, and Carol Devens’ Countering Colonization: Native American Women and Great Lakes Missions, 1630-1900 for more on these processes.)

But to pretend that “percolating” and “capillary” power is all that was involved, or to suggest that capitalism could have emerged from these and these alone, is to close one’s eyes to equally well known and well documented facts. Primitive accumulation required massive violence and coercion, hegemonic “winner take all” battles, genocide and the enforced subjugation of women, not just bribery and subterfuge.

Not So Newest After All?
Despite Day’s claim that the “logic of affinity” is inherently opposed to “hegemonic” politics, what emerges from a look back at past revolutions is the incredible degree to which they have all in fact incorporated “non-branded tactics” and at times even embraced the “logic of affinity”. Such “hybrid” revolutionary movements are not exceptions, but rather the unexceptional norm. Indeed, it is difficult to think of any movement for radical or revolutionary social change which has been purely hegemonic.

To understand why Day considers hegemony and affinity to be not different aspects, but mutually incompatible modes of social change, we must take a closer look at this Revolution that affinity is supposed to eschew. According to Day, this is a “totalizing”, “final” event, of millenarian proportions. On a par with Moshiach’s arrival or Christ’s return, Day’s hegemonic Revolution endeavours to change everything, everywhere, for everyone.

Yet this is obviously a strawman of sorts.

Although I am not a Marxist (and am thus not knowledgeable enough to be 100% sure of this!), my understanding is that dialectical materialism implies a lack of such “final” events, because every thesis is expected to give rise to an antithesis. Furthermore, both of the main branches of Leninism have their own “unfinal” ways of looking at social change, be it in the Trotskyist doctrine of “permanent revolution” or Mao’s “one divides into two”. You don’t have to agree with these, or even understand them, to see that they surpass the kind of all-at-once-or-nothing-at-all ethos that Day paints the entire tradition with.

And in fairness, many anarchist revolutionaries have also rejected the simplistic idea of revolution as “end of history”. Not only Kropotkin, but in fact many if not most anarchist revolutionaries have a more sophisticated and nuanced view of revolutionary change than Day gives them credit for. In the words of Alexander Berkman, for instance, “you must not confuse the social revolution with anarchy. Revolution, in some of its stages, is a violent upheaval; anarchy is a social condition of freedom and peace. The revolution is the means of bringing anarchy about but it is not anarchy itself. It is to pave the road to anarchy, to establish conditions which will make a life of liberty possible.”

In other words, neither anarchism nor Marxism depends on equating “revolution” with “utopia”. The former is a hegemonic event not in the sense of changing “everything, everywhere, all at once for everyone”, but rather in changing as much as possible for as many as possible as quickly as possible (“occur[ing] across a wide spectrum – indeed, the widest spectrum possible – of social, political, cultural, and economic structures and processes” (65)). As such, it preserves its hegemonic ambition, while accepting that victory need not be “total” to be victorious. Many of us would happily concede that more than one revolution may be necessary…

(I am tempted to suggest – with my tongue planted firmly in my hyperbolic cheek – that revolution itself, as has been actually practiced warts and all, is simply a “non-branded tactic” passed down to us from the radical past…)

A Dangerous Fantasy
(In fairness, before getting into the next section I must repeat what I wrote at the beginning of this embarrassingly long review, namely that Day does occasionally seem to contradict his apparent thesis by claiming without explanation that he does not necessarily reject all hegemonic strategies and goals… which, if it is the case, would obviate some of what follows.)

According to Gramsci Is Dead, setting up alternatives and making the State “redundant” is not only our best weapon, it is the only offensive weapon we should use in our struggle against domination.

Such a strictly “non-hegemonic” ethos may be beautiful, but it is also suicidal. If radicals close their eyes to the inherently hegemonic dimensions of our struggle, they risk being unprepared and disarmed when it counts the most. They risk even being dead, or responsible for the deaths of others.

This is serious stuff, so it is worth breaking down where “non-hegemonic” purism goes most seriously wrong…

Most of the time the system is not in a state of collapse, and radical social movements are not threatening to actually make capitalism unprofitable or make the State “redundant”. Indeed, such crises are rare here in the First World. In this stable context, the State’s interests are best served by not imposing hegemonic choices on radicals, by not being too repressive. For the State to declare war on the left would reveal to much about the system’s true nature, and risk destabilizing the ruling class’ own internal equilibrium.

So most of the time First World radicals deal with a certain level of repression, but are not in an actual state of war with the system. This is true post-911 just as it was before, the significant increase in repression these past years notwithstanding.

But what would happen if the State did see itself being made “redundant” by a radical movement? Or – to use one of Day’s awkward terms which seems to mean “business as usual being disrupted” - what if its “flows were impeded”?

This could be expected to happen were Day’s “affinitive” radicalism to prove effective. More and more people would make their “lines of flight” to escape the system, more and more would opt out, more and more would choose to relate to each other in a non-Statist manner. When discussing what might happen, Day suggests that the system may simply collapse:

“[I]f this kind of action proliferates sufficiently, the flows will start to decay beyond the ability of systems of control to manage them. This is especially true as the neoliberal world order expands in size and complexity. […] Extending this line of analysis further, though, we encounter another problem: the sudden collapse of the neoliberal order would indeed create the conditions for a modernist revolution, which many of us would find quite heartening. But, as has happened so many times before, very few people would be ready to accept a life of non-domination and non-exploitation – most would seek new masters, and a few would try to accommodate them.” (33-34)

This is where Day’s vision becomes a fatal mirage.

States do not allow themselves to “become redundant”, and classes to not non-violently relinquish power. What’s more, when “collapse” does occur, domination is not re-established by some consensual “seeking masters who will accommodate”… what you actually get is not a smaller weaker Statist enclave but an explosive authoritarian rebirth: the Taliban, the Nazis, the Ayatollahs and such. While some children of America may still be able to “escape” Bush’s bad dream, the children of Liberia will tell you that when the shit hits the fan, you can’t just tune in and drop out.

Even before State power crumbles, the ruling class has qualitatively, not just quantitatively, different levels of repression kept in reserve. If a movement for social change “percolates” beyond a certain point, those in power will radically up the ante, placing the entire terrain of struggle on a completely different level. Assassinations, internment camps, martial law... those conditions which Day concedes may make hegemonic struggles acceptable in the Third World will suddenly be brought home, only without a hegemonic vision nobody would be prepared… and yet the State prepares for this eventuality even in times of non-crisis because it understands its own existence in hegemonic terms – it’s just ruling class common sense, like driving with a seat belt or diversifying your portfolio.

In other words: the ruling class will not fade away. If it goes, it will go out with a bang –once a certain line has been crossed, it will engage perceived threats in an “all or nothing”, “totalizing” conflict.

This is not melodrama, it’s simply an unexceptional (and if you think about it, not very surprising) lesson to be learned from even a cursory look back at history. Under what circumstances did Pinochet take power? And Franco? How did the “dirty war” in Colombia come about? How come so many Black Panthers ended up getting murdered way back when? Why is Leonard Peltier still in prison? Do you remember how the “War on Terror” began – do you think it was really just because Bush cares about dead stockbrokers, or might someone have felt their power challenged?

Did America “percolate” into Baghdad?

If the State decides it is threatened by the “newest social movements” – or even if some faction simply wants to exploit some space that has temporarily left capital’s orbit – we will be in a new situation. It will be like playing chess, but only knowing the rules for checkers. Our only hope involves planning, preparation, and ambition which cannot be limited to the strictly non-hegemonic. Offensive actions; neutralizing problems before they become threats; learning skills in anticipation for this future conflict; and most importantly raising awareness that, in the long term, we can not co-exist with this system, but must think in terms of killing it… these are the historic “modernist” “hegemonic” responsibilities of those seeking fundamental radical social change.

To close our eyes to this is to allow ourselves – and others! – to be lead peacefully to the slaughter.

In Conclusion
Gramsci Is Dead is well argued, and provides interesting insights into how radical change occurs. It also lays the theoretical foundations for valuing the unglamorous but necessary everyday work that is necessary to build liberation.

Richard Day is not suggesting radicals merely drop out of society and engage in their own escapist fantasies. He clearly considers this system to be evil, and holds that radical activism can influence things for the better. But his vision of how this can be done is too timid. He tells us that the best we can hope for is to win people over from their desire to support the system (or try to re-establish it if it happens to collapse), and argues that the only way we can do this is by showing people alternative ways of doing things.

Nobody is disputing the value of affinity. “Here and now” projects, aimed at building social structures and institutions that put our beliefs into practice are vitally necessary, and serve as strong foundations for our future liberation. This is where most of us should be putting most of our energy most of the time. By providing a theoretical explanation for why such alternative structures are necessary, and how “lifestyle choices” in fact intersect with political activism, Gramsci Is Dead contributes to our vision of radical social change.

So read this book. Apply the logic of affinity to your own practice. By all means, “trust in non-unified, incoherent, non-hegemonic forces for social change” (155) – not because “hegemonic ones cannot produce anything that looks like change to you at all”, but rather because it’s good to keep your eyes on the ball, which should be how to make this world a better place.

But keep your eyes open too – and your mind as well. Clear skies don’t mean there aren’t clouds beyond the horizon. A cloudy sky doesn’t mean the sun no longer exists. Don’t only think about whether or not Day’s argument applies to your reality so far, think of the implications in other situations, ones that you have no guarantee of avoiding forever.

I have always embraced the logic of affinity, and am glad to read what Richard Day has to say about this.

Still, I remain open to the promise of hegemony.

Because in the end, that’s what it will take.

Categories: anarchism, autonomous-marxism, book-review, revolution

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Caliban and the Witch [Part Three of Four]

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Caliban and the Witch
Women the Body and Primitive Accumulation
(Sylvia Federici, Autonomedia 2004)

reviewed by Karl Kersplebedeb

Here is the third part of my four-part review of Sylvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch - the best book i read in 2006.

Please note that a tidier and shorter version of this review is appearing in the journal Upping the Anti (#2) in December 2005.
(for information on Upping the Anti please visit the Autonomy and Solidarity website.)

If you are just joining us, you may prefer to start with the First Installment which you can view here.

(The second and fourth parts can be viewed here.)

Please also note that the entire review is now up on the Kersplebedeb website in html and pdf format!

Men Were the Key: A Tragedy in Three Acts

A careful reading of Caliban and the Witch allows us to see that the capitalist counter-revolution was built around male violence against women.


As noted above, class warfare repeatedly forced the Church and nobles to retreat, resorting to defensive maneuvers. It now must be added that all too often these maneuvers laid the basis for more advanced forms of exploitation and left the ruling class in a position to regain the upper hand. One way this happened was by manipulating differences within the working class, by intensifying the exploitation of some sections in order to reduce pressure on, or even buy off, other sections. This has been done time and time again within our own recent history, along the fault-lines of race, sex and nation. Federici describes this as being one part of primitive accumulation, which “was also an accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class, whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as ‘race’ and age, become constitutive of class rule, and the formation of the modern proletariat.”[20]

ACT ONE

The first example of this “accumulation of differences” that Federici gives is “commutation,” whereby serfdom was effectively ended in the 12th and 13th centuries, with rent and taxes replacing forced labour. This prefigured many contemporary reforms in that “like many workers’ ‘victories’ which only in part satisfy the original demands, commutation too co-opted the goals of the struggle, functioning as a means of social division and contributing to the disintegration of the feudal village.”[21]

Previously, land had been held by the serf family (not just the husband), and the terms of servitude had been hereditary; now the land was rented (generally just to the “free” man) and the relationship was regulated by money. A very small minority who were lucky enough to live on the best plots were able to pay and even hire other peasants to work for them, but the vast majority found it difficult to pay, sometimes falling into debt, sometimes even losing their land.

This new class division had gender, and women were now often barred from possessing or inheriting land in their own name. Little wonder that they formed a majority of those who migrated to the towns and cities, and that they would be so prominent within the heretical sects.

ACT TWO

Two hundred years later, when as a consequence of widespread class revolt and the aftereffects of the plague the ruling class was again pushed to the brink, opportunism and division amongst the oppressed once more proved key. Federici explains how the rebelliousness of male workers was channeled into sexual violence, women’s bodies providing a pleasant diversion and safety valve to relieve social pressure. Drawing on the Jacques Rossiaud’s research about prostitution in 15th century France[22], she describes a literal rape movement, whereby sexual assaults on any poor woman were now tolerated by the authorities, essentially decriminalized. At the same time, state-run brothels were established where the masses of poor landless women could earn the money necessary for their survival. (This helps to explain the “ascetism” and rejection of sex by certain medieval heretical sects – as we know from our own era, when sex is being used as a weapon, celibacy can be a liberating choice.)

Rossiaud interprets the mass raping of women as a form of class protest; the rapists often believed that their victims – often maids, servants, or washerwomen – had sex with their masters. This is one of the most intriguing parts of Caliban, even though only a page or so was spent discussing it. Neither the internet nor most standard works on medieval women discuss this, so considering that Federici describes this as a decriminalization of rape, and as a ruling class strategy, more information about the previous legal situation and supporting evidence that this was a thought-out plan would have been welcome.

It would be important to examine this in greater depth as the scapegoating of women for the crimes of the ruling class is still with us: the class resentment that is subsumed in hostility to the “rich bitch,” the loose woman who betrays her class (or nation), the JAP, the “daddy’s little princess”... remember how Eldridge Cleaver bragged that rape was an insurrectionary act?[23] Consider the following passage by Maria Mies:

“This dimension of the relationship of men of colonized countries to men of colonizing countries, I would like to call the BIG MEN-little men syndrome. The ‘little men’ imitate the BIG MEN. Those who have enough money can buy all those things the BIG MEN have, including women. Those who do not have enough money still have the same dreams.”[24]

What Federici is describing in 15th century Europe seems to have been an early example of the “BIG MEN-little men syndrome,” which has since been exported to societies around the world. This was (is) not only class envy, but also a class conflict in gendered drag: male workers are offered free sex at the expense of women, for whom it spells a constant threat to any meaningful freedom at all.

This rape movement was a win-win situation for the authorities: both a carrot for the male workers and a stick for the female working class. And it was a sign of the times, for simultaneous to this rape movement a similar dynamic was playing out in regards to women’s labour. In this, too, craftsmen played a key role – campaigning to exclude women from their workshops, claiming that they were working for lower wages (lower than whom?[25]). So back in the 15th century, when people depended more and more on money to acquire the necessities of life, women’s ability to earn this money was curtailed to the benefit of men of their class.

“It was from this alliance between the crafts and the urban authorities, along with the continuing privatization of land, that a new sexual division of labor […] was forged, defining women in terms – mothers, wives, daughters, widows – that hid their status as workers, while giving men free access to women’s bodies, their labor, and the bodies and labor of their children.”[26]

One is reminded of Mies’ observation that “The process of proletarianization of the men was, therefore, accompanied by a process of housewifization of women.”[27]

INTERMEZZO

It is here that a second question arises, one that lay hidden behind the question of violence against women: the nature of classes, and of class alliances. This is a question that Mies has tackled head on, but when Federici broaches it, her argument seems inconsistent. This does not detract from the wealth of information and insights that she does share with us, but it does leave room for misleading conclusions, so it is worth discussing.

These were cross-class alliances, whereby men separated themselves from working class women in order to ape the privileges and power of their “betters,” and yet Federici insists that male workers did not really benefit from their new position, that the “state-backed raping of poor women undermined the class solidarity that had been achieved in the anti-feudal struggle.”[28] Furthermore, “the devaluation and feminization of reproductive labor was a disaster also for male workers, for the devaluation of reproductive labor inevitably devalued its product: labor-power.”[29]

This is confusing, as it seems clear that some working class men most definitely did exploit women for their own gain. They enjoyed a formal economic gain in the form of higher wages. They benefited sexually by having increased access to women’s bodies. As women were warped through the process of housewifization, men eventually enjoyed a hidden economic bonus in that so much work that previously had to be paid for or done by the male worker himself was now done by the female houseworker. One is also reminded of what Mies wrote:

“Proletarian men do have an interest in the domestication of their female class companions. The material interest consists, on the one hand, in the man’s claim to monopolize available wage-work, on the other, in the claim to have control over all money income in the family.”[30]

Because there is no explicit discussion of the nature of class – beyond her promising observation that gender can be a specification of class relations – it is difficult to know Federici’s rationale for claiming that these opportunistic acts were against men’s interests. Perhaps she feels that as men’s alienation and exploitation can only be solved by revolution, any behaviour that works against this goal is not in their interest; in this sense it might be said that although this opportunism was in their personal interests it remained against their class interests, but this formulation becomes unwieldy when we insist on seeing gender as a “specification of class,”[31] and unconvincing when we are given no evidence of male resistance to women’s subjugation. Men seem to have “voted with their feet,” perhaps resisting some aspects of class rule but often collaborating in new mechanisms of exploitation and oppression, so that like “whiteness” today, “maleness” in these instances seems to be the most important specification of class.

Whether or not the mass of men (or white people) are acting “in their class interests” really becomes a matter of what one wants to believe about the working class. From a certain philosophical perspective even the ruling class has an “interest” in abolishing class rule: it is obvious that once one has accepted the desirability of a classless non-hierarchical society, that goal seems far more alluring than waking up in this cesspool but finding out that you’ve won the lotto. But this is not usually how “class interest” is understood…

Perhaps one way to untie this knot is to acknowledge that men also must also have been warped by this process – becoming more sexist, less respectful of the women in their community, more prone to dismiss, to degrade, to beat and to rape. We are not told of any significant resistance to this transformation by the men concerned. So while the abstract genderless worker may have suffered as a result of these attacks on women, the new male worker was served by the increasing subordination of women – which in no way lessens the fact that this was a historic human tragedy.

ACT THREE: Still Higher Levels of Violence

We cannot know what would have happened had the balance of forces remained at this level, for events conspired to once again push the ruling class to the brink. Just a few hundred years after the plague, the labour shortage that continued into the 16th century due to the widespread hostility to capitalist work was exacerbated by a new decrease in the population (probably due to the increase in poverty as the gains of the 14th and 15th centuries were undone).

This was the era of the capitalist counter-revolution, and yet the new capitalist class could not create the labour they needed like they could make cloth or steel. Both Mies and Federici agree on this point that two of the greatest crimes of that age were committed to find a way around this crisis: mandatory procreation for European women and the mass kidnapping and enslavement of Africans. In Mies’ words: “The counterpart of the slave raids in Africa was the witch hunt in Europe. The two seem to be connected through the same dilemma with which the capitalist version of man-the-hunter is faced: however much he may try to reduce women to a mere condition of production, to nature to be appropriated and exploited, he cannot produce living human labour power without women.”[32]

While Federici does not deal with the effects of the slave trade on gender relations within Africa, and only touches upon the way in which ideas of male and female power developed amongst African slaves in the “New World,” she does note that “capitalism may not even have taken off without Europe’s ‘annexation of America,’ and the ‘blood and sweat’ that for two centuries flowed to Europe from the plantation.”[33]

What Federici does concentrate on is the war against women in Europe, the hammer of housewifization which “degraded maternity to the status of forced labor.”[34]

European men had been burning witches since the 15th century, but this had originally just been one part of the campaigns against the heretics. In the 16th century the persecution of witches went from the margins to being the center of this campaign, and the accusations changed from being primarily about religious beliefs to concentrating on sexual perversion,infanticide and reproduction. By the 17th century as many as 100,000 women were killed, and just as many more had their lives ruined by the accusation.[35]

Whereas Mies emphasized the economic role of the Witch-Hunt, the way in which the theft of women’s property was part of primitive accumulation, Federici convincingly casts doubt on this, pointing out that the overwhelming majority of victims had no property or wealth to speak of. Rather, this was a politically motivated war against women: what had to be destroyed was “the female personality that had developed, especially among the peasantry, in the course of the struggle against feudal power, when women had been in the forefront of the heretical movements, often organizing in female associations, posing a growing challenge to male authority and the Church.”[36]

Federici does us the service of contextualizing this mass murder within a growing hostility to women. At the same time as “witches” were being publicly tortured and killed, governments across Europe were passing laws against contraception, abortion, adultery, and especially infanticide – all of which were punishable by death. Other changes registered at this time are also worth mentioning: prostitution was now criminalized in such a way as to harshly punish the woman but hardly touch the male customer, the word “gossip” (which had meant “female friend” previously) now took on disparaging meaning, and – like women in Iraq today – new levels of male hostility forced women indoors, for to be seen walking the streets without a male escort was to risk insult or attack.[37]

If it is tempting to see the Witch-Hunt as just one detail in this rise in misogyny, especially since historians are now saying that the number of dead was so much smaller than previously thought, one should remember what these trials and executions were like. These were public events, which normally involved new and incredibly sadistic forms of sexual torture approaching vivisection.[38] The way in which the “guilty” were executed was also harrowing – drowning, burning, etc. – and the entire village (including the woman’ children) was often forced toattend. So the 100,000 witches who were burnt during the Great Hunt (if this number stands future scrutiny) would have had a very different psychological effect than 100,000 deaths on a battle field. The murder of each woman thus became powerful propaganda.

Nevertheless, all of these changes, and not just the Witch-Hunt, did come together as pieces of a larger puzzle; men with big ideas were making their dreams come true, finally summoning the necessary violence to snuff out centuries of rebellion and resistance to class rule. The draconian “pro-life” legislation; making money male by driving women out of the formal economy; the Witch-Hunt – all of this was supported by the leading intellectuals of the day. A modern process - “the secular courts conducted most of the trials, while in the areas where the Inquisition operated (Italy and Spain)the number of executions remained comparatively low”[39] – aimed at completely rooting out “a whole world of female practices, collective relations, and systems of knowledge that had been the foundation of women’s power in pre-capitalist Europe, and the condition for their resistance in the struggle against feudalism.”[40]

You can view the First Installment of this review here and the Second Installment here and the Fourth Installment here - or you can view the whole thing on the Kersplebedeb site in html or pdf format.

Footnotes

20] Federici, p. 63. [back to text]

21] Federici, p. 29. [back to text]

22] Rossiaud, Jacques Medieval Prostitution (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell 1988) [back to text]

23] Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice [back to text]
24] Mies, p. 167 [back to text]
25] This complaint – still heard in anti-immigrant campaigns today, as well as in the right-wing of the anti-globalization movement –should be understood as one set of ambitious workers trying to increase the price of their skills (i.e. wage) by limiting the labour supply by excluding(and, incidentally, impoverishing) another set of workers. [back to text]

26] Federici, p. 97. [back to text]

27] Mies, p. 69. [back to text]

28] Federici, p. 48. [back to text]

29] Federici, p. 75. [back to text]

30] Mies, p. 109 [back to text]

31] Federici, p. 14. [back to text]

32] Mies, p. 69. [back to text]

33] Federici, p. 103. [back to text]

34] Federici, p. 92. [back to text]

35] Federici, p. 208. Previous estimates of the numbers of witches killed had run into the millions – German feminist Ingrid Strobl put it at “between 9 and 30 million” (in “Fear of the Shivers of Freedom”) – but more recent research which seems to be accepted by feminists puts the figure much lower. See “Recent Developments in the Study of the Great European Witch-Hunt” by Jenny Gibbons at http://www.cog.org/witch_hunt.html
[back to text]

36] Federici, p. 184. [back to text]

37] Federici, p. 99-100. [back to text]

38] According to Mies, “The torture chambers of the witch-hunters were the laboratories where the texture, the anatomy, the resistance of the human body – mainly the female body – was studied. One may say that modern medicine and the male hegemony over this vital field were established on the base of millions of crushed, maimed, torn, disfigured and finally burnt, female bodies.” (p. 83) [back to text]

39] Federici, p. 168. [back to text]

40] Federici, p.102. [back to text]


Categories: autonomous-marxism, book-review, caliban-and-the-witch, capitalism, feminism, heresies, history, repression, sexism, sexuality, violence-against-women, witches, women

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Caliban and the Witch [Part Two of Four]

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Caliban and the Witch
Women the Body and Primitive Accumulation
(Sylvia Federici, Autonomedia 2004)

reviewed by Karl Kersplebedeb

Here is the second part of my four-part review of Sylvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch - the best book i read in 2006.

Please note that a tidier and shorter version of this review is appearing in the journal Upping the Anti (#2) in December 2005.
(for information on Upping the Anti please visit the Autonomy and Solidarity website.)

If you are just joining us, you may prefer to start with the First Installment which you can view here.

(The third and fourth parts can be viewed here.)

Please also note that the entire review is now up on the Kersplebedeb website in html and pdf format!

Enter Capitalism

“Capitalism was the response of the feudal lords, the patrician merchants, the bishops and popes, to a centuries-long social conflict that, in the end, shook their power […] Capitalism was the counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from the anti-feudal struggle – possibilities which, if realized, might have spared us the immense destruction of lives and the natural environment that has marked the advance of capitalist relations worldwide.” [13]


The term “counter-revolution” should be explained, as it might be understood as a reactionary offensive to restore or maintain the status quo. In actual fact, most counter-revolutions do not do this, rather they re-organize society in a new and more brutal way; like Nazism or the Taliban, what we are really talking about is a revolution from the right.


These analogies are chosen with care, for Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries bears a striking similarity to fascist and fundamentalist societies in our own time. Repression and control were the watchwords of the day, in fact modern medicine, psychology, demographics and the social sciences all developed at this time in a grand effort to learn how to make people “fit” into the straitjacket of capitalist relations.


As in Hitler’s Germany and the Taliban’s Afghanistan, the metaphysical nature of the human being herself was re-conceptualized: it was at this time that intellectuals separated the body from the mind (or conscience, or soul), leaving it a fleshy machine to be governed by either the disciplined individual or the State. Feelings like lust, hunger, anger and fatigue were all blamed on this “mindless” body, now described as a rebellious subject that needed to be tamed. As it came to be more and more repressed, those outside the realm of formal production – children, women, colonial subjects and people living outside of capitalism – all came to be associated with an ever-more wild, earthy, sexual and “natural” carnality. Patriarchal capitalism’sfetishes for Black and female bodies are ascribed to this process: “For the definition of blackness and femaleness as marks of bestiality and irrationality conformed with the exclusion of women in Europe and women and men in the colonies from the social contract implicit in the wage, and the consequent naturalization of their exploitation.”[14]


The idea of a “mind/body dichotomy” being part of capitalist relations had a certain currency in feminist and anarchist circles back in the 1980s, and Mies referred to it as a “colonizing division,”[15] though without any of the explanatory rigor found here. Over the past twenty years it has never been completely abandoned, but has found itself increasingly left to the practitioners of post-modernist mumbo jumbo, relegated to the margins of most serious political analysis.[16] In plain language and without recourse to spiritual or flakey concepts Federici convincingly explains how this self-alienation resulted from the brutality and violence of early capitalism.


At the same time as individuals were now supposed to be disciplined and deny themselves any “unproductive” pleasures, popular culture was also being attacked by the new capitalist intelligentsia. People had previously had a communal culture that was rich in games, folklore and ritual, and this now had to be suppressed or radically re-crafted: “taverns were closed, along with public baths. Nakedness was penalized, as were many other ‘unproductive’ forms of sexuality and sociality. It was forbidden to drink, swear, curse.”[17] Magical beliefs and superstitions, which often encouraged the belief that one might “get something for nothing,” were also attacked: “How could the new entrepreneurs impose regular work patterns on a proletariat anchored in the belief that there are lucky and unlucky days, that is, days on which one can travel and others on which one should not move from home, days on which to marry and others on which every enterprise should be carefully avoided?”[18]


This suppression of people’s bodies and culture was the more sophisticated side of capitalist “progress,” but Federici also describes the many ways in which people were forced off of their land, including the Enclosures,the fencing off of common land which peasants depended on for their survival. Yet even once they were landless, too many preferred to take their chances in the teeming counter-culture of vagabonds, beggars and rebels than work for a wage. This led to “the introduction of ‘bloody laws’ against vagabonds, intended to bind workers to the jobs imposed on them, as once the serfs had been bound to the land, and the multiplication of executions.”[19]

You can view the first installment of this review here and you can read the third installment (which comes next) here.

Footnotes

13] Federici, pp. 21-22. [back to text]

14] Federici, p. 200. [back to text]

15] Mies, p. 210. [back to text]

16] I would qualify this by acknowledging that the concept has retained slightly more currency in the queer and feminist movements, and remains central to the anti-psych movement, though these movements are perhaps also less firmly entrenched in the left now than they were twenty years ago. [back to text]

17] Federici, pp. 136-137. [back to text]

18] Federici, p.142. [back to text]

19] Federici, p. 136. [back to text]

Categories: anti-psych, autonomous-marxism, body-politics, book-review, caliban-and-the-witch, capitalism, europe, fascism, history, sexuality

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