Sunday, May 31, 2009

182

stone, is really the continued intensification of economic
processes of exploitation; as Foucault says, of maximization. This
is a matter of advancing productive techniques not the capture of
subject positions; after achieving for capital mere geographical
ubiquity now boss-science must shove aside the old mole to strip
mine and hollow out existence at the level of the infinitesimal, it
transforms autonomous life-processes into factories. Mice, trees,
viruses are now to be used to grow injection-molded
commodities. And it is precisely at this moment that pro-
revolutionary and Marxist critique formulated both the subjectivity
of 'many struggles', and conceptualized the flanking maneuvers
by which state-capital would capture these positions, leaving to the
pro-revolutionaries irrelevant positions in the political sphere where
they must defend tunnelled out and undermined territories by
means of resistance. From the Seventies to the present pro-
revolutionaries have done little more than occupy defensive and
reactionary positions, resisting the encroachment of forces that
they had already theorized must win, the theory of recuperation
has always been recuperated. It achieved a condition of peace,
'OK lads, struggle at fist in hope but go limp when you feel the grip
tightening'. Recuperation, the theory of defeat, the theory of
'upsurges' and 'downturns' in struggle inevitability facilitated the
withdrawal of thousands of militants from the struggle in apparent
good faith.

But they were wrong, what was going on, the apparent radical rise
and legalized decline of personalist politics was nothing to do with
a wide ranging political and military engagement of social
movements with capital. From the start these radicalities had a
commodified aspect; there was no rise and decline at all, no loss of
revolutionary potential, no falling away of impetus or direction even
if there was a spectacular trajectory of sorts. Personalist politics
never articulated the maneuver or recuperation, which in itself
was an ideology of resignationa nd an embrace of
political/academic mystification; this process was never a case of
subjectivities and their capture, but of the furtherance of a specific
mode of production. From the beginning personalist liberation
strategies aimed at the establishment of bureacratic and cultish
elites which, when fully ripe, could be swallowed whole by general
administrative structures of the state and economy, that and
the development of differentiated markets: the black dollar,
separatist economies, the pink pound, the gay village, the women's

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