We contest nothing, we demand nothing. We constitute ourselves as a force, as a material force, as an autonomous material force within the world civil war.
As we apprehend it, the process of instituting communism can only take the form of a collection of acts of communisation, of making common such-and-such space, such-and-such machine, such-and-such knowledge. That is to say, the elaboration of the mode of sharing that attaches to them.
Communising a place means: setting its use free, and on the basis of this liberation experimenting with refined, intensified, and complexified relations. If private property is essentially the discretionary power of depriving anyone of the use of the possessed thing, communisation means depriving only the agents of empire from it.
When the moment will come, it will be a matter of actually turning to our advantage the generalised social collapse, to transform a collapse like the one in Argentina or the Soviet Union into a revolutionary situation. Those who pretend to split material autonomy from the sabotage of the imperial machine show that they want neither.
Our strategy is therefore the following: to immediately establish a series of foci of desertion, of secession poles, of rallying points. For the runaways. For those who leave. A set of places to take shelter from the control of a civilisation that is headed for the abyss. It is a matter of giving ourselves the means, of finding the scale in which all those questions, which when addressed separately can drive one to depression, can be resolved. How to get rid of all the dependencies that weaken us? How to get organised so as to no longer have to work? How to settle beyond the toxicity of the metropole without “leaving for the countryside”?
Empire is not some kind of extraterrestrial entity, a world wide conspiracy of governments, financial networks, technocrats, and multinational corporations. Empire is everywhere nothing is happening. Everywhere things are working. Wherever the normal situation prevails.
At every moment we are taking part in a situation.
There is a general context – capitalism, civilisation, empire, call it what you wish – that not only intends to control each situation but, even worse, tries to make sure that there is, as often as possible, no situation.
The streets and the houses, the language and the affects, and the worldwide tempo that sets the pace of it all, have been adjusted for that purpose only. Worlds are everywhere calibrated to slide by or ignore each other. The “normal situation” is this absence of situation. To get organised means: to start from the situation and not dismiss it. To take sides within it. Weaving the necessary material, affective and political solidarities. This is what any strike does in any office, in any factory. This is what any gang does. Any revolutionary or counter-revolutionary party.
The position within a situation determines the need to forge alliances, and for that purpose to establish some lines of communication, some wider circulation. In turn those new links reconfigure the situation. The name we give to the situation that we are in is “world civil war”. For there is no longer anything that can limit the confrontation between the opposing forces. Not even law, which comes into play as one more form of the generalised confrontation. The ‘we’ that speaks here is not a delimitable, isolated we, the we of a group. It is the we of a position. In these times this position is asserted as a double secession: secession first with the process of capitalist valorisation; then secession with all the sterility entailed by a mere opposition to empire, extra-parliamentary or otherwise; thus a secession with the left.
We contest nothing, we demand nothing. We constitute ourselves as a force, as a material force, as an autonomous material force within the world civil war. This call sets out the conditions.
The anarchist from THE FA, the council communist, the Trotskyist from ATTAC and the Republican Congressman start from the same amputation, propagate the same desert.
Politics, for them, is what is settled, said, done, decided between men. The assembly that gathers them all, that gathers all human beings in abstraction from their respective worlds, forms the ideal political circumstance. The economy, the economic sphere, ensues logically: as a necessary and impossible management of all that was left at the door of the assembly, of all that was constituted, thus, as non-political and so becomes subsequently: family, business, private life, leisure, passions, culture, etc.
That is how the classical definition of politics spreads the desert: by abstracting humans from their worlds, by disconnecting them from the network of things, habits, words, fetishes, affects, places, solidarities that make up their world, their sensible world, and that gives them their specific substance.
Classical politics is the glorious stagecraft of bodies without worlds. But the theatrical assembly of political individualities cannot mask the desert that it is. There is no human society separated from the sum of beings. There is a plurality of worlds. Of worlds that are all the more real because they are shared. And that coexist.
The political, in truth, is the play between the different worlds, the alliance between those that are compatible and the confrontation between those that are irreconcilable.
All in all, we would rather start from small and dense nuclei than from a vast and loose network. We have known these spineless arrangements long enough.
That it might take a generation to build a victorious revolutionary movement in all its breadth does not cause us to waver. We envisage this with serenity. Just like we serenely envisage the criminal nature of our existence, and of our gestures.
WE HAVE KNOWN, we still know, the temptation of activism. The counter-summits, the No-Border camps, the occupations, and the campaigns against evictions, new security laws, the building of new prisons; the succession of all of this. The ever-increasing dispersion of collectives responding to the same dispersion of activity.
Activism is the first reflex. The standard response to the urgency of the present situation. The perpetual mobilisation in the name of urgency is what our bosses and governments have made us used to, even when we fight against them.
Forms of life disappear every day, plant or animal species, human experiences and countless relationships between them all. But our feeling of urgency is linked less to the speed of these extinctions than to their irreversibility, and even more to our inability to repopulate the desert.
Activists mobilise themselves against the catastrophe. But only prolong it. Their haste consumes the little world that is left. The answer of the activist to urgency remains itself within the regime of urgency, with no hope of getting out of it or interrupting it. The activist wants to be everywhere. She goes everywhere the rhythm of the breakdown of the machine leads her. Everywhere she brings her pragmatic inventiveness, the festive energy of her opposition to the catastrophe. Without fail, the activist mobilises. But she never gives herself the means to understand how it is to be done. How to hinder in concrete terms the progress of the desert, in order to establish inhabitable worlds here and now.
The political techniques of capitalism consist first in breaking the attachments through which a group finds the means to produce, in the same movement, the conditions of its subsistence and those of its existence. In separating human communities from countless things – stones and metals, plants, trees that have a thousand purposes, gods, djinns, wild or tamed animals, medicines and psycho-active substances, amulets, machines, and all the other beings with which human groups compose worlds.
Ruining all community, separating groups from their means of existence and from the knowledge linked to them, it is political reason that dictates the incursion of the commodity as the mediator of every relation.
These political techniques of capitalism find their maximal point of concentration in the contemporary metropole. The metropole is the place where, in the end, there is almost nothing left to reappropriate. A milieu in which everything is done so the human only relates to himself, only creates himself separately from other forms of existence, uses or rubs shoulders with them without ever encountering them.
We know that building a power of any scale will take time. There are lots of things that we no longer know how to do. In fact, as all those who benefited from modernisation and the education dispensed in our developed lands, we barely know how to do anything. Even gathering plants for cooking or medicinal purpose rather than for decoration is regarded at best as archaic, at worst as quaint.
We make a simple observation: everyone has access to a certain amount of resources and knowledge made available by the simple fact of living in these lands of the old world; and can communise them. The question is not whether to live with or without money, to steal or to buy, to work or not, but how to use the money for increasing our autonomy from the commodity sphere. And if we prefer stealing than working, producing for ourselves than stealing, it is not out of concern for some kind of purity. It is because the flows of power that accompany the flows of commodities, the subjective submission that conditions the means of survival, have become exorbitant. There would be many inappropriate ways to say what we envisage: we neither want to leave for the countryside nor gather ancient knowledge to accumulate it. We are not merely concerned with the reappropriation of means. Nor would we restrict ourselves to the reappropriation of knowledge. If we put together all the knowledge and techniques, all the inventiveness displayed in the field of activism, we would not get a revolutionary movement. It is a question of temporality. A question of creating the conditions where an offensive can sustain itself without fading, of establishing the material solidarities that allow us to hold on.
We believe there is no revolution without the constitution of a common material force.
WE SET THE POINT REVERSAL, OF THE WAY OUT OF THE DESERT, THE END OF CAPITAL, in the intensity of the link that each manages to establish between what he or she lives and what he or she thinks. Against the partisans of existential liberalism, we refuse to view this as a private matter, an individual issue, a question of character. On the contrary, we start from the certainty that this link depends on the construction of shared worlds, on the sharing of effective means.
The recent securitisation of the State proves only this: that the western societies have lost all force of aggregation. They no longer do anything but manage their inexorable decay. That is, essentially, prevent any re-aggregation, smash all that emerges. All that deserts.
All that stands out.
But there is nothing to be done. The state of inner ruin of these societies lets a growing number of cracks appear. The continuous refurbishment of appearances can achieve nothing: here, worlds form. Squats, communes, groupuscules, barios, all try to extract themselves from capitalist desolation. Most often these attempts fail or die from autarchy, for lack of having established contacts, the appropriate solidarities, for lack also of conceiving themselves as parties to the world civil war.
But all of these re-aggregations are still nothing in comparison with the mass desire, with the constantly deferred desire, to drop out. To leave.
In ten years, between two censuses, a hundred thousand people have disappeared in Great Britain. They have taken a truck, bought a ticket, dropped acid or joined the maquis. They have disaffiliated. They have left.
We would have liked, in our disaffiliation, to have had a place to rejoin, a stand to take, a direction to follow.
Many that leave get lost.
Many never arrive.
Our strategy is therefore the following: to immediately establish a series of foci of desertion, of secession poles, of rallying points. For the runaways. For those who leave. A set of places to take shelter from the control of a civilisation that is headed for the abyss. It is a matter of giving ourselves the means, of finding the scale in which all those questions, which when addressed separately can drive one to depression, can be resolved. How to get rid of all the dependencies that weaken us? How to get organised so as to no longer have to work? How to settle beyond the toxicity of the metropole without “leaving for the countryside”? How to shut down the nuclear plants? How to not be forced, when a friend goes mad, to resort to psychiatric pulverisation; or to the acerbic remedies of mechanistic medicine when he falls ill? How to live together without mutually dominating each other? How to react to the death of a comrade? How to ruin empire?
We know our weaknesses: we were born and we have grown up in pacified societies, that are as if they have been dissolved. We have not had the opportunity to acquire the consistency that moments of intense collective confrontation can give. Nor the knowledge that is linked to them. We have a political education to mature together. A theoretical and practical education.
For this, we need places. Places to get organised, to share and develop the required techniques. To learn to handle all that may prove necessary. To co-operate. Had it not renounced any political perspective, the experimentation of the Bauhaus, with all the materiality and the rigor it contained, would evoke the idea that we have of space-times dedicated to the transmission of knowledge and experience. The Black Panthers equipped themselves with such places; to which they added their politico-military capacity, the ten thousand free lunches they distributed everyday, and their autonomous press. They soon formed a threat so tangible to power that the special services had to be sent to massacre them.
By communism we mean a certain discipline of the attention.
The practice of communism, as we live it, we call “the Party.” When we overcome an obstacle together or when we reach a higher level of sharing, we say that “we are building the Party.” Certainly others, who we do not know yet, are building the Party elsewhere. This call is addressed to them.
No experience of communism at the present time can survive without getting organised, tying itself to others, putting itself in crisis, waging war. “For the oases that dispense life vanish when we seek shelter in them.”
As we apprehend it, the process of instituting communism can only take the form of a collection of acts of communisation, of making common such-and-such space, such-and-such machine, such-and-such knowledge. That is to say, the elaboration of the mode of sharing that attaches to them. Insurrection itself is just an accelerator, a decisive moment in this process. As we understand it, the party is not an organisation – where everything becomes insubstantial by dint of transparency – and it is not a family – where everything smells like a swindle by dint of opacity.
The Party is a collection of places, infrastructures, communised means; and the dreams, bodies, murmurs, thoughts, desires that circulate among those places, the use of those means, the sharing of those infrastructures.
The notion of the Party responds to the necessity of a minimal formalisation, which makes us accessible as well as allows us to remain invisible. It belongs to the communist way that we explain to ourselves and formulate the basis of our sharing. So that the most recent arrival is, at the very least, the equal of the elder.
Looking closer at it, the Party could be nothing but this: the formation of sensibility as a force. The deployment of an archipelago of worlds. What would a political force, under empire, be that didn’t have its farms, its schools, its arms, its medicines, its collective houses, its editing desks, its printers, its covered trucks and its bridgeheads in the metropole? It seems more and more absurd that some of us still have to work for capital – aside from the necessary tasks of infiltration.
The offensive power of the Party comes from the fact that it is also a power of production, but that within it, the relationships are just incidentally relationships of production.
Through its development capitalism has revealed itself to be not merely a mode of production, but a reduction of all relations, in the last instance, to relations of production.
The overthrowing of capitalism will come from those who are able to create the conditions for other types of relations.
Communising a place means: setting its use free, and on the basis of this liberation experimenting with refined, intensified, and complexified relations. If private property is essentially the discretionary power of depriving anyone of the use of the possessed thing, communisation means depriving only the agents of empire from it.
In a general way, we do not see how anything else but a force, a reality able to survive the total dislocation of capitalism, could truly attack it, could pursue the offensive until the very moment of dislocation.
When the moment will come, it will be a matter of actually turning to our advantage the generalised social collapse, to transform a collapse like the one in Argentina or the Soviet Union into a revolutionary situation. Those who pretend to split material autonomy from the sabotage of the imperial machine show that they want neither.
At the last count, in August 2003, we can say that we face the greatest offensive of capital since the beginning of the eighties. Anti-terrorism and the abolition of the last gains of the defunct labour movement set the parameters of a diffuse discipline. Never have the managers of society known so well from which obstacles they are emancipated and what means they hold. They know, for instance, that the planetary middle-class that lives henceforth in the metropole is too disarmed to offer the slightest resistance to its planned annihilation. Just like they know that the counter-revolution they conduct is now inscribed in millions of tons of concrete, in the architecture of so many “new towns.” In the longer term it seems that the plan of capital is indeed to bring out on a global scale a set of high-security zones, continuously linked together, where the process of capitalist valorisation would embrace all the expressions of life in a perpetual and unhindered way. This imperial deterritorialised comfort zone of citizens would form a kind of police continuum where a more or less constant level of control would prevail, politically as well as biometrically. The “rest of the world” could then be treated, in the incomplete process of its pacification, as a foil and, at the same time, as a gigantic outside to civilise. The chaotic experiments of zone-to-zone cohabitation between hostile enclaves as it has been taking place for decades in Israel would be the model of social management to come. We do not doubt that the real stake in all this, for capital, is to reconstitute from the ground up its own society.
Whatever the form, and however high the price.
We have seen with Argentina that the economic collapse of a whole country was not, from its point of view, too high a price to pay.
From year to year the pressure increases to make everything function. As the social cybernetisation progresses, the normal situation becomes more urgent. And from then on, in an absolutely logical way, the situations of crisis and malfunction multiply. A power failure, a hurricane, or a social movement, do not differ from the point of view of empire. They are disturbances. They must be managed. For the moment, that is to say on account of our weakness, these situations of interruption appear as moments in which empire arises, takes its place in the materiality of worlds, experiments with new procedures. For it is precisely there that it ties itself more firmly to the populations it claims to rescue. Empire claims everywhere to be the agent of return to the normal situation. Our task, conversely, is to make habitable the situation of exception. We will genuinely succeed in “blocking corporate-society” only on condition that such a “blockage” is made up of desires other than that of a return to normality.
What happens in a strike or in a “natural disaster” is in a way quite similar. A suspension occurs in the organised stability of our dependencies.
At that point the being of need, the communist being, that which essentially binds us and essentially separates us, is laid bare in each. The blanket of shame that normally covers it is torn apart. The receptiveness for encounter, for experimentation of other relations to the world, to others, to oneself, as it appears in these moments, is enough to sweep away any doubt about the possibility of communism. About the need for communism too. What is then required is our ability to self-organise, our ability, by organising ourselves right away on the basis of our needs, to prolong, to propagate, to give effectivity to the situation of exception, which has always formed the basis of state terror only because it has remained a threat on the part of state.
This is particularly striking in “social movements”. The very expression “social movement” seems to suggest that what really matters is what we are heading towards, and not what happens here. There has been in all the social movements up till now a commitment not to seize what is here, which explains why they follow each other without ever becoming a force, like a succession of breaking waves. Hence the particular texture, so volatile, of their sociality, where any commitment appears revocable. Hence also their invariable drama: a quick ascent thanks to an echo in the media, then, on the basis of this hasty aggregation, the slow but inevitable erosion; and finally, the driedup movement, the last group of diehards who get a card from this or that union, found this or that association, expecting in this way to find an organisational continuity to their commitment. But we do not seek such continuity: the fact of having premises where we might meet, and a photocopier to print tracts. The continuity we seek is the one which allows us, after having struggled for months, to not go back to work, to not start working again as before, to keep doing harm. And this can only be built during movements. We must, as we were saying, organise ourselves on the basis of our needs – manage to answer progressively the collective question of eating, sleeping, thinking, loving, creating forms, coordinating our forces – and conceive all this as a moment of the war against empire.
It is only in this way, by inhabiting the disturbances of its very program, that we will be able to counter that “economic liberalism” which is only the strict consequence, the logical application, of the existential liberalism that is everywhere accepted and practised. To which each one is attached as if it were the most basic right, including those who would like to challenge “neo-liberalism.” This is the way the Party will be built, as a trail of habitable places left behind by each situation of exception that empire meets. We will not mistake, then, how the subjectivities and the revolutionary collectives become less fragile, as they give themselves a world.
In order to become effective, the perspective of breaking the capitalist circuits requires that the secessions multiply, and that they consolidate.
We will be told: you are caught in an alternative which will condemn you in one way or another: either you manage to constitute a threat to empire, in which case you will be quickly eliminated; or you will not manage to constitute such a threat, and you will have once again destroyed yourselves.
There remains only the wager on the existence of another term, a thin ridge, just enough for us to walk on. Just enough for all those who can hear to walk and live.
* [This document contains the concrete strategic content of The Call; all theory of capitalist subjectivity has be excised; its essence is available in Existential liberalism. —AFC]