Saturday, June 6, 2009

44

of that movement, such fateful soothesayings lead negation
back into contained forms of engagement.

What there is in the world that is not determined by capitalism is
the entirely mute but donkey-stubborn a-historical resistance of
human flesh; it is the body and its desire not to be productive that
resists capitalism; OK, this is a completely negative formulation, but
we have seen how pro-consciousness values always end by
flipping into their opposite. The body remains unchanged,
enslaved by fundamentally unhelpful. Bodyresitance is a drag on
maximization, in its unmediated form it cannot become articulate
other than in times of crisis - when the body speaks; all other
representations of the working class in political form serve only to
keep productivity going - one way or another improving messages
arrive always from above. The proletariat is a mute and ugly body
that has been electric-prodded into existence, it has no worth other
than its integration into the productive machinery from which
capital is generated. It is this integration of the human body (and
its tendency towards rest) with the productive form (and its
tendency towards maximization) that gives the proletariat its
revolutionary thrill. The body's impulse is to shrink from the
machine and the machine's impulse is to shrink from the body, no
other intimacy was ever so frigid. And no other socially defined
category has the capacity to engage so up-close with the
productive process. All other social movements and categories
end by floundering in the drying mudflats under the burning rays of
a merciless sun.

The proletariat will not be motivated by political values in its
resistance to work but by its selfish interest to assert its species
being; its bodily desire to be human floods across the barriers of its
separation. There is nothing nice or noble or heroic about the
working class, it is essential to the productive process which
constitutes the structure of reality and therefore essential to
revolution and the abolition of reality based upon production.

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