"The tip of a larger cultural iceberg"


Nathan Coombs of The Guardian on the UCSC occupation and the "communist Revival." While I disagree with some of this (including the fact that the "Communiqué From an Absent Future" isn't the manifesto of the occupation, but rather a related document with which we share certain perspectives), this is a relatively sharp and quite welcome piece. We must make communism at once less and far more frightening: something thinkable and accessible, even in its attempt to practically insist on an impossible world, and something that can be a world threat again, a shifting banner under which to gather and become the kind of mass subject capable of struggling with a totality, refusing to make demands, and making evident not just the hard work of antagonism but also of construction out of and through the channels of a system that will never give us what we want. The cultural reemergence and dissemination of the word now, perhaps with enough of its Stalinist semiotic baggage cut loose, is a needed start.

"What is now needed is for workers and students to stop making demands on the state, whether that be nationalisation, concessions or government intervention; and figure out how to take their occupied spaces and make them their own."

Indeed.

2 comments:

Benladen said...

appropriate of communism as taking on a completely new cultural valence:

http://i237.photobucket.com/albums/ff110/Benla/lilwaynecommunist.jpg

(from the video for "Down" by Jay Sean feat. Lil Wayne)

Unknown said...

Lil Wayne has stated the communist t-shirt he wears in the "Down" music video holds no political meaning, nor is he making a statement. He just liked the shirt! The video was shot in London on April 24, 2009.

Haha oh lord. And this is the easiest time to be a communist, too.