August 22, 2013

Logistics and Opposition | Mute

The interruption or sabotage of the infrastructure of mobilisation are the other side of The Coming Insurrection's conception of communes not as enclaves for beautiful souls, but as experiences through which to develop the collective organs to both foster and endure the crisis of present, and to do so in a fashion that does not sever means from ends. The book's catastrophic optimism lies in advocating that interruption is somehow generative of anti-capitalist collectivity (rather than passing irritation or mass reaction). It is also founded on a repudiation of the inauthenticity of massively mediated, separated and atomised lives in the metropolis.

via www.metamute.org

Aug 22, 2013 5:37:22 PM

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Ernest Mandel: Mandel on Althusser, Party and Class (1982) Indeed, in any really centralized organization the leadership unavoidably enjoys the advantages accorded by centralization. It obtains information, centralizes the practical experiences of the party as a whole and transmits unitary instructions to all party organs. Draft resolutions or theses circulate in the party before congresses or national conferences. These constitute the foundation for all debates. This is not in itself an evil. It is even an advantage, an indispensable feature of any functioning organic structure. To understand the objective role of this centralization is to understand that it is not merely an “organizational” or even administrative phenomenon, but represents a social and political necessity. What this centralization expresses is the attempt of Marxists, of communists, to overcome the fragmentation of the experience of the proletariat lived in isolation, factory by factory, industry by industry, region by region. The interest of the class as a whole is different from that of its individual sectors or components and is brought out only through centralization of the practice and the experience of the class struggle. However, the mechanisms of centralization can not be made to work solely in favor of the leadership and at the same time preserve their functional objectivity and effectiveness from a class struggle perspective, unless one adopts the absurd Stalinist thesis that the leadership is infallible. A number of objections have been raised with respect to the right to form tendencies. In the first instance it is alleged that it is contrary to Leninism, since the 10th Congress...

Jodi Dean

Jodi Dean is a political theorist.

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