Unlike apologists for capitalist social relations, communudists have no desire to exalt the superiority of ‘modern man’ over his primitive forebears. On the contrary, communudists intuitively understand the ‘grandeur’ of primitive man and see in the society of the future a restoration, albeit on a higher level, of the primitive communism of the classless societies of the past.
Communudists know that anyone who wishes to be consistent in their opposition to capitalism must necessarily re-appropriate the types of consciousness that emerged from primitive communities, as well as their social form. Since the primitive community is a true community, a society without exploitation, in which production is still geared towards the satisfaction of human needs, it follows that a large part of the material resources of these societies were directed not simply towards the immediate struggle for existence but rather into activities that were enjoyed simply for their own sake. Work was suspended and life became play. The remorseless necessity to direct activity towards some future goal was replaced by pursuits without pre-determined ends. The tyranny of time was suspended and instead everybody found themselves transported into an ecstatic present.
ONCE AGAIN ON "CLASS STRUGGLE VS. IDENTITY POLITICS"
Written by DAMTP
Below we're publishing 2 texts: 2012 "Communisation Theory and the Question of Fascism" by cherry angioma, along 1990s one "Do Men Exist?" by NOT the Red Menace - are reproduced as a follow up to the discussion held at Alytus Psycho De-colonization Conference in September 21st - 22nd, 2012 and reported in part at:
It is now more than five years since the start of the financial crisis with no sign of respite from austerity and increasing insecurity. Neither the old left of unions and parties or the newer social movements of protest and direct action seem to be up to the task of offering a way forward. In the search for new road maps to navigate crisis and the possibilities of life beyond capitalism, the concept of ‘communisation’ has become an increasing focus of discussion.
The word itself has been around since the early days of the communist movement. The English utopian Goodwyn Barmby, credited with the being the first person to use the term communist in the English language, wrote a text as early as 1841 entitled ‘The Outlines of Communism, Associality and Communisation’. He conceived of the four ages of humanity as being ‘ ’Paradisation, Barbarization, Civilization and Communisation’, while his wife and collaborator Catherine Barmby anticipated current debates about gender with early feminist interventions arguing for communisation as a solution to women’s subordination (Goodwyn Barmby is discussed in Peter Linebaugh, ‘Meandering on the semantical-historical paths of communism and commons’, The Commoner, December 2010).
The Barmbys’ use of the term to describe the process of the creation of a communist society is not a million miles away from its current usage, but it has acquired a more specific set of meanings since the early 1970s when elements of the French ‘ultra-left’ began deploying it as a way of critiquing traditional conceptions of revolution. Communism has often been conceived of by both Marxists and anarchists as a future state of society to be achieved in the distant future long after the messy business of revolution has been sorted out. For advocates of communisation on the other hand, capitalism can only be abolished by the immediate creation of different relations between people, such as the free distribution of goods and the creation of ‘communal, moneyless, profitless, Stateless, forms of life. The process will take time to be completed, but it will start at the beginning of the revolution, which will not create the preconditions of communism: it will create communism’ (Gilles Dauvé & Karl Nesic, ‘Communisation’, 2011).
Today this broad notion of communisation is used in various different ways, but arguably there are two main poles in current debates – albeit with many shades in between.
In a way very similar, yet different - to the construction of moving structures proposed by Ricardo - my proposal for a few day workshop at Nepokorennye studios was to explore the possibilities of other kind of material that could be put to work in the public realm – namely digital texts used for email spamming.
While Ricardo has a passion for spectacular technology, on my behalf I invited the participants of OKK-led workshops to try out the practice of Psychic Spam Attacks. Having tactically played around with re-writing and re-sending spam e-mails from my own mailbox, I was glad to share the experience of the initiative entitled POLARIS INTERNATIONAL Limited (in which I was myself involved), and give advice, as well as provide the spam text material to the workshop participants. In order to bring these kind of Opinion Props to the public realm, some form of identity would be "created" - at least in the form of an e-mail address.
We would draw on the rich history of multiple identity creation in order to question the fundamentals of the bourgeois society - all kind of separations including the one of "high" (namely art) and "low" culture, singular identity, and the capitalist logic of value creation.
АТАКА ПРОТИВ I ТРИЕННАЛЕ СОВРЕМЕННОГО БЕЛОРУССКОГО ИСКУССТВА БЕЛЭКСПО-АРТ 2012 /// ASSAULT AGAINST 1ST TRIENNIAL OF CONTEMPORARY BELORUSSIAN ART BELEKSPO-ART 2012
Today, November 23rd, 2012, the group of artists and activists did an action insde the official opening of the 1st triennial of Contemporary Belorussian Art BelEkspo-Art 2012. The acton was a part of the alternative parralel program of selforganized lectures, meetings, shows, actions and workshops.
In topology, knot theory is the study of mathematical knots. While inspired by knots which appear in daily life in shoelaces and rope, a mathematician’s knot differs in that the ends are joined together so that it cannot be undone. In precise mathematical language, a knot is an embedding of a circle in 3-dimensional Euclidean space, R3. Two mathematical knots are equivalent if one can be transformed into the other via a deformation of R3 upon itself (known as an ambientisotopy); these transformations correspond to manipulations of a knotted string that do not involve cutting the string or passing the string through itself.
Knots can be described in various ways. Given a method of description, however, there may be more than one description that represents the same knot. For example, a common method of describing a knot is a planar diagram called a knot diagram. Any given knot can be drawn in many different ways using a knot diagram. Therefore, a fundamental problem in knot theory is determining when two descriptions represent the same knot.
Links are also the subject of knot theory. A link consists of several knots (called components) and interwinted in any manner.
Knot theory was introduced as a scientific topic of investigation by “two middly eccentric nineteenth century Scottish physicists,” Lord Kelvin and Guthrie Tait.Today knot theory is one of the most active research areas of mathematics, but because of its developments in relation with knots and links, cibernetic studies has also included it as an useful tool. The idea of a net, as something whose nature escapes any definition other than that where elements relate to each other, so that their identity is nothing but the way in which they lead to others and the way others lead to them, was first applied by mathematicians in order to understand the complexity of certain links of knots. In that sense aiming to define any element in such a system, we would have to assume its incompleteness.
Chus Martínez is a relatively obscure Spanish guitarist who in the late-sixties and early-seventies played cheesy easy listening tunes with this band -- often covers of well known hits. Given Martinez's failure to conquer the world musical scene he can be interpreted as a symbol of heroic failure, and his name has been specially selected for a new multiple identity project in the tradition of Monty Cantsin, Karen Eliot and Luther Blissett. The Chus Martínez moniker has the advantage of being one that might belong to either a male of a female since Chus as a first name does not appear to be gender specific. In this way it is superior to any previous multiple identity we are aware of. Chus Martínez is a transsexual collective phantom. Anyone can be Chus Martinez - just start using the name!
DIWALI SOLAR ECLIPSE TECPATL NOVEMBER 14, 2012 - MINJUNG PSYCHIC STRIKE
„Next November 14 we will have the first Iberian general strike in history. Iberian and Hellenic. Yesterday the head of Greece's GSEE union, Yiannis Panagopoulos, declared that another general strike would be held in Greece on the 14th. EU unions had called for a pan-Europe general strike this week, and it appears to have been answered. The question now, is whether other countries might follow….“- Fernando Lezcano, CCOO
We have no interest in a "European" strike - this is not general - even if it is not confined to a trade or workplace or industry it is still regional -or else historic or ethnic. Even the so-called radical and revolutionary IWW, which purports to build one big union for all workers, is now taking on a European regional administration - which is unnaceptable and undermines its industrial organisation.
Yet in solidarity with all workers DAMTP and DEWOU-DAMTP – IU007/700 & IU000 join the international general strike further extending it beoyond pan-Euro-nationalist space of light through time limitations by death towards class dimensions of the situation.
We expand the hyper national Iberia whether it be Ebra or Areya or Eire and to destroy European nationalism in calling for our international comrades of AMKAAK and ITRAF and AMANDLA and beyond to join a psychic minjung strike and ask our comrades who are psychicly or geographically or psychogeographicly outside europe. And we ask those comrades of Asia, America, Africa and beyond what assistance they need in joining us in this strike. And we demand other more organised workers to assist us!
We also have no interest in the bourgeois „support from the world of culture for the 14N Iberian general strike“:
[Left to right: Luther Blissett, Janez Janša and Chus Martinez]
My Name Is Janez Janša is a 2012 documentary film about three contemporary artists, one of them the film director, who in 2007 all changed their name to that of Janez Janša, the Prime Minister of Slovenia. A number of way more interesting and earlier previous avant-grade and underground anti-art movements influenced this action including Dadaism, mail art and neoism.
Multiple name concepts – the idea that a single name should be used by a group of individuals- did not play a starring role in the history of Dada. But Hausmann, Grosz, Baader, Herzfelde and Herzfelde’s ‘Christ & Co. Ltd’ achieved more than footnote status in the standard histories of the Berlin avant-garde. Hausmann recollects the founding of this society in “Courier Dada”(Paris 1958): “I took Baader to the fields of Sudende (where Jung then lived), and said to him: ‘All this is yours if you do as 1 tell you. The Bishop of Brunswick has failed to recognize you as Jesus Christ, and you have retaliated by defiling the altar in his church. This is no compensation. From today, you will be President of The Christ Society, Ltd, and recruit members. You must convince everyone that he too can be Christ, if he wants to, on payment of fifty marks to your society. Members of our society will no longer be subject to temporal authority and will automatically be unfit for military service. You will wear a purple robe and we shall organise an Echternach procession in the Potsdamer Platz. I shall previously have submerged Berlin in biblical texts. All the poster columns will bear the words “He who lives by the sword shall perish by the sword”.’”
MINJUNG ART STRIKE BIENNIAL AGAINST WORLD’S PSYCHIC BIENNIALIZATION!
Written by ABRACADABRA-C
[open address to the Gwangju World Biennial Forum No.1 to happen on 27-31 October 2012]
World biennial forum is just conference alongside with Gwangju Biennial - you are collecting representants of the largest biennials of the world and sponsor those, who are colonizable. While "Founded in memory of spirits of civil uprising of the 1980 repression of the Gwangju Democratization Movement" the biennial is unable to speak on the student strikes against imperial occupation in 1945 and also the more recent workers strike at Kumho Tire Co. plant in Gwangju who began a general strike on Aug. 16 2012
Minjung art is exactly the recuperation of the essential antiimperialist and anti-american movement : With the democratization of the 1990s, Minjung art started losing their concrete aim and became part of the mainstream - post modernism - the colonist biennial simply sold up any trace of disobedience. We must include our solidarity with murdered and tortured Minjung art psychic workers of 80-ies Gwangju uprising and disclaim recuperation of their memory by Gwanju biennialization-recuperation-colonialization processes.
ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE BRUTAL, RACIST, SEXIST AND CLASSIST EVICTION OF DALE FARM IN ESSEX
Written by REproductiVe wOrkers and Lovers indUsTrIal uniON (REVOLUTION)
We hereby authorise the eviction of Eric Pickles and the government he represents
Not just the Party but the system of governance is obsolete and hereby given NOTICE TO QUIT
We call on all workers, including Eric Pickles, to join the psychic workers union or indeed start their own psychic workers union in opposition to the bourgeoisie
We are now here
REproductiVe wOrkers and Lovers indUsTrIal uniON (REVOLUTION) 2012
WE HEREBY AUTHORISE THE EVICTION OF ERIC PICKLES AND THE GOVERNMENT HE REPRESENTS
NOT JUST THE PARTY BUT THE SYSTEM OF GOVERNANCE IS OBSOLETE AND HEREBY GIVEN NOTICE TO QUIT
WE CALL ON ALL WORKERS, INCLUDING ERIC PICKLES, TO JOIN THE PSYCHIC WORKERS UNION OR INDEED START THEIR OWN PSYCHIC WORKERS UNION IN OPPOSITION TO THE BOURGEOISIE
WE ARE NOW HERE
infoRmation, intElligence, military operatiVes: sOcial, poLitical and culTural workers: PROPHETS SEERS & SAGES:
Join the union of Data Miners & Travailleurs Psychique
REVOLUTION AGAINST RAPE
Written by REproductiVe wOrkers and Lovers indUsTrIal uniON (REVOLUTION)
British atrocities - both direct and indirect through collaboration with rape and murder around the world must come to an end now
The backlog of cases from Kenya between the 1960s and 2000s of rape cases by British soldiers is now coming to trial in 2012
However the indirect rape and genocide by British authorities is still be brought to account.
The deportation of refugees is a clear example of where the UK and other European governments continue to practice racist neo-colonial policy of rape murder and genocide across the planet.
Ms Margaret Nambi, despite having fresh claim through new evidence of rape in Uganda - has been detained and threatened with deportation to where she will surely be tortured.
We have no hope for the British authorities and call on all workers to bring about its total downfall.
We also demand that all workers do whatever they can to ensure that Ms Margaret Nambi is allowed to remain in this country as per her wishes and that all is done to ensure the safe passage of her children too.
2012
DAMTP ALYTUS MEETING REPORT & REFLECTIONS
Written by DAMTP
The DAMTP meeting took part in Alytus on September 21st – 22nd, 2012.
The main topic was defined as psychic (de)colonization, agenda (the word proposed by Mawuna) – prolegomena for future actions.
OPPRESSION IS NOT A SIMPLE MATTER: DIRECTED AS REACTION TO ALYTUS MEETING
Written by Chus Martínez
[DAMTP COMMENT ATTACHED IN THE END]
Oppression is not simple matter. I will start more or less arbitrarily and then stop here and there on different points.
Part of the problem with racism, sexism, etc. is that while capital structures all of our social relations, it also takes over a lot of what preceded it. This is not to say that sexual oppression is very much like it was in other times and places, nor that sexual oppression is expressed or experienced uniformly in the current day, in all places. Capital subordinates the world to itself, and has done so more or less successfully, but it also does so unevenly and without wiping out all particularities. Capital's universality (instantiation of the capital-labor relation, generalization of money and exchange, separation of the producers from the means of producing and the product, etc.) goes hand in hand with production of all kinds of particularity, which often appears as autonomous from or unrelated to it. For a social relation where each difference has become an opportunity to market niche commodities, each 'community' becomes little more than a potential market, and each oppression has generated a new ‘community’, defined less by struggle against a particular oppression, which need not propose a new identity after all, than by its being given the status of an identity through the market (often with the help of the capitalist left, not to mention the nationalists seeking their own market.)
Capital generates differences automatically because wherever/whenever, as well as when/where it is necessary to split labor. In both cases its representatives make use of existing differences and generate new ones. Sometimes this happens consciously as in strikes or other social struggles (in the U.S., The Populist Movement in the 1890's comes to mind as another example) where capitalists, politicians, the media, etc. consciously play upon and generate differences to undermine class solidarity. All bourgeois politics is, except when it is forced to engage in simple, outright oppression, divide and conquer. It is better to make people fight among themselves, than confront a united body head on.
REPORT ON ALYTUS 2012 DAMTP MEETING: PSYCHIC EUROCENTRIST [WORKERS'] COLONIZATION FEATURES OF BELARUS AND AFRICA
Written by Yakizdat
The group Lipovy Tsvet from Belarus during the DAMTP conference in Alytus did a situationist-linguistic-surrealist strike uder the code name: "BLA BLA BLA - MY IDENTITY". The you can see the following report of their on-situ activities - the whole text of Mbaku Fidelis Mbabit is included as also some more visual presentations of other psychic workers and lipovy Tsvet themselves.
Со стороны участников группы Липовый цвет на этой конференции в течение 2-х дней происходила языковая ситуационистская забастовка с кодовым названием "bla-bla-bla - my identity". Результаты этой забастовки приведены ниже.
ZUCKERBROT UND PEITSCHE - MILITÄR UND KULTUR, EINE ERFOLGSGESCHICHTE AUS KASSEL///CARROT AND STICK – MILITARY AND CULTURE, A HISTORY OF SUCCESS OUTCOME OF KASSEL
Written by Otto Karl Kamal
[reloaded with English version. original text in German - below]
If we talk about Kassel and documenta, we must also remember that the place itself is a really important location for the German arms industry: since several decades it has been re-established in this historical place. The tactical proximity between war and culture is in no way new situation of geopolitical strategies. By means of the example of Kassel, we realise how cultural politics (on both global and regional level) crystalize as a part of hegemonic power structures, sometimes more visual, sometimes more sublime, but constant nevertheless. The most important armament players in the Kassel region (business volume of several billions of Euros):
Wenn wir von Kassel und der documenta reden, müssen wir auch immer im Hinterkopf behalten, dass wir hier von einen Ort reden, an dem ein wichtiger Standort der deutschen Rüstungsindustrie seit vielen Jahrzehnten wieder platziert ist. Die Nähe von Krieg und Kultur ist kein neuer Zustand geopolitischer Strategien. Anhand des Beispiels von Kassel wird deutlich wie die Kulturpolitik (auf globaler/sowie regionaler Ebene) sich als Teil hegemonialer Machtstrukturen herauskristallisiert, mal deutlicher, mal versteckter, aber durch die Zeit hindurch konstant. Die derzeit wichtigsten Rüstungs-Player in der Kasseler Region (mit milliardenschweren Umsätzen) sind:
Rheinmetall Defense, Krauss-Maffei Wegmann und Eurocopter1
[Pablo Hermann, Afghaniswahn, 2011, Tusche und Acryl auf Papier, 20x30cm]
The leitmotif of Christov-Bakargiev about the reflection of the past is going beyond. “Kassel is the city which was destroyed and rebuilt”, says the boss of documenta. “And in the middle of the wreckage (ruins) the documenta was initiated. This aspect brought me to follow one question/idea: when I look at the present situation, I have a problem to comprehend with the simultaneousness of collapse and recovery. For Afghanistan, both counts: the state of things after and during the war. And that is very curious. The war ended in 2004, everybody came back and the war seems to be over. At the same time, everyone said the war is still going on there. The difference between now and 1945/46 is that crisis and no-crisis can now exist side by side. […]” (http://www.3sat.de/page/?source=/kulturzeit/themen/160698/index.html)
What Christov-Bakargiev is instigating here is namely that the war was over already in 2004 - while all the facts speak about proportionately more casualties in the time after 2004 than in the duration of 3 years prior to the “end of the conflict”.
Here I am “only” referring to the military casualties. The number of civil victims must be multiplied by thousands (just in the sole year of 2010 there were over 10.000 civilian deaths) (2)! The Allied troops from 2001 till 2004 reported exactly 200 deaths, and between 2005 and 2012 (…), there were 2944 (3). Bearing such numbers in mind, it is either sarcastic or aggressively naïve to speak about this aforementioned “no-crisis”, or “end of the war”. And the person, who is digging the history of last centuries' Afghanistan, will find no difficulty to nail down the colonial causalities and effects from these approaches that triggers bigger or smaller armed conflicts. Considering this, the “no-crisis” idea of Christov-Bakargiev is extremely problematic to digest (4).
[updated! - English version included. Original-german - version to be found bellow]
Ten years after the surrender of the Nazis and the digestion of the German people about the insane adventure of the National Socialism, the first documenta in Kassel in 1955 came into the world. In the same year Kassel welcomed the former armed forces member (1939-1945) and First Lieutenant (1944-1945) in the Nazi Germany of Adolf Hitler, FJ Strauss (CSU party member - Christian Social Union). He arrived in order to accelerate the reconstruction of the defense industry in Kassel in the postwar period (the barely 10 years since asleep the surrender of the Nazis) - as a former party chairman of the CSU, atomic Minister of the Federal Republic of Germany (1955), who later became defense minister, Prime Minister of Bavaria and candidate for Chancellor of Germany. Then the Bundeswehr (German Military) was re-established on the 5 May 1955. Since the fifties, Strauss was a key lobbyist regarding NATO and open advocate of the McCarthy era. He has also advanced the witch-hunt of dissidents (1) in occupied Germany. His efforts in cooperation with the cultural and economic institutions were for the awakening of the dormant war production as early as the second half of the fifties, a success. There we have the two Henschel successor companies (2) (6 generations and Nazi regimes with more than 6000 forced laborers), also Wegmann (3), Rheinmetall (4) and Krauss-Maffei Wegmann (5), who in the 50's re-entered with a bang into the weapons business .
1955 was the season of awakening for Kassel after the end of World War II in a decade of despair, hunger, guilt, and resistance to rebuilding the machinery of war, persecution of pacifists of the left and religious (6) spectrum - which called the soldiers killers, denunciations, reinstatement of former Nazis (7) in national security and politics go hand in hand with the occupying forces. These turbulent times, the platform for the development of the first Documenta were to simultaneously, so to calm the turmoil. Reconstruction, restoration, creation ...
Again, again and again, that's part of the motto, which has Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev dedicated their Documenta 13 "collapse and reconstruction." Breakdowns and disasters from natural processes (meteorites, earthquakes, tsunamis ...) with their self-regeneration / healing of nature are placed in parallel with human-made disasters (pogroms, wars, displacement, exploitation, enslavement ...) each with their reconstruction / self-healing are presented with a holistic relation to the same level along the different venues documenta for a clientele of more than 750,000 "refined", privileged visitors. The message of her diffused concept Non-concept and its presentation is read by a mass mainstream audience. As a natural process, as were war and neo-colonialism to a natural behavior of our existence as a group disasters of war with exploitation, delusion, torture, expulsion, racism and all the symptoms of diseases such as hatred and violence would then be natural processes that should happen in our existence. As with any environmental disaster and colonial processes and exploitative behavior would mean unavoidable and natural processes (the process functions like a sedative).
