Friday, March 27, 2009

202

of itself in its locational particularity, also realised elements
within its bounds that were entirely determined by the generality,
but which had gone unrecognized - beginning with the very idea of
separateness, of the niche and specialization. Communes and
elective communities establish themselves as a refined type of
capitalist living even as they pose as an opposition and alternative
to more conventional capitalist livings. The end for the commune,
like that of the ideological party is the pursuit itself; its drive, like
the drive of the millenarian sect, is the unhappy sense of never
quite completing the circle; the endless reforms and modifications;
the self-promotion and recruiting; the struggle for society-tight
seals and temporal enclosure like re-enactment 'experiments' of
the past staged regularly at stately homes, "television sire? Prithy,
what is that? And pray why doth thou go about in such strange
garb?" Individual assertions of transcendence do not escape
mass-conformist individualism but complete its criteria by overly
complicated means. The conformity by rebellion pattern is not
confined to the lifestylist anarchist milieu, there is an uncritical
expectation amongst pro-revolutionary communists that they might
live the unfragemented life, that in the posing of themselves as an
opposition to capital they incarnate its overcoming. Of our
contemporaries, these two examples demonstrate the tendency,
The Bad Days Will End say this, "Communism is not a 'program'
nor a goal of the distant future; it is the living historical movement
of resistance and revolution by workers and the oppressed
ourselves against capitalism and exploitation ins all its forms", and
Aufheben go further,

"The real movement must always be open, self-cricital, prepared to
identify limits to its present practice and overcome them.
Here it
is understood that communism 'is not an ideal to which reality must
accommodate itself'. Our task is to understand, and to be
consciously part of something which already truly exists - the real
movement that seeks to abolish the existing conditions."


Is there a real, unconscious, subterranean movement towards
communism? And is the 'task' of revolutionaries to 'understand'
this movement by bringing it into the open, and thus redeeming
themselves with a godly importance? Is there "a real movement"
against capitalism, a movement of social events which
incorporates communism into itself as much at the beginning as

No comments:

Post a Comment