Second thing to share and be spread wide: Camatte's introduction, in French, to a volume of Bordiga's writings.
Ne pas tenir compte de cela serait trahir la passion de Bordiga et la nôtre qui doit obligatoirement atteindre son but:: le communisme...
Camatte on Bordiga
Second thing to share and be spread wide: Camatte's introduction, in French, to a volume of Bordiga's writings.
Ne pas tenir compte de cela serait trahir la passion de Bordiga et la nôtre qui doit obligatoirement atteindre son but:: le communisme...
Present for comrades, 1
I end up tracking down things in my "research" that deserve to be seen/read/heard much more widely. Time to stop holding them close and start putting them up. First, many of you have been wanting to see this, so here is La Classe Operaia Va in Paradiso (The Working Class Goes to Heaven), 1971, with English subtitles. One of the greatest pieces of political cinema ever made. I'd say enjoy, but that doesn't quite capture it.
Continued existence as industrial accident
Coda to X:
"In regard to the reproduction phase (especially circulation time), note that use value itself places limits upon it. Wheat must be reproduced in a year. Perishable things like milk etc. must be reproduced more often. Meat on the hoof does not need to reproduced quite so often, since the animal is alive and hence resists time; but slaughtered meat on the market has to be reproduced in the form of money in the very short time, or it rots."
To be alive - meat on the hoof, rather than just meat (in-itself, if you wish) - is to resist time. To stave off reproduction, a reproduction that will liquify frozen form.
The question is if it will coalesce again. For once slaughtered, the countdown begins: money or rot, money or rot...
Money being, of course, just a way to keep said meat animated after the fact, to recoup its loss and recuperate its supposed generative potential, via
1. The preservation of the meat: money exchanged for refrigeration, workers to make sure no one shoplifts a rack of beef, butchers to cut into smaller pieces
2. The monetary consumption of the meat: the cash exchanged before the point of no return (the "sell by date"), the meat as a vector or medium for other activities involving money (unwaged work of cooking, energy bought to grill it up)
3. [optional] The physical consumption of the meat: the caloric energy frozen in that meat is processed, albeit by an initial caloric expenditure of chewing and cutting, and thereby reproduces the potential labor-power of the eater. If unused, it will gather in convenient storage units around the thighs and belly, ready for a Stakhanovite effort to come knocking.
4. [optional] The application of the meat: that caloric energy gets used by the one who ate it, thereby joining the ex-life of the meat with the life of the human "meat on the hoof" busy resisting time and rot.
The mode of the meat's destruction, though, is utterly irrelevant, provided that the first two conditions occur. It's "supposed" to get plowed back into circulation not just as money but as caloric input into the reproduction of a body, preferably one that might do some work. But it does not matter. Only that it has been reproduced. That is to say, utterly transformed.
It might seem, then, that "we" humans are the exception here, not only because we are the source of value. Rather, because we are, in general, that whose reproduction requires a preservation of that existing thing in its distinct life and form (read: body able to sell labor-power, perhaps to actually expend some energy toward a hypothetically productive end, economic subject of getting paid, and point of transfer/proper name through which money flees back into the market). Would that it were so. Our reproduction, as subset of the circulation and accumulation of capital, cares not a whit about the preservation of these specific things, these individual bodies we are that sit and run, talk and read, drool and make seatbelts, these minds that come along with them, these persons we aim to be, these worlds that shatter into night when we die.
No: what matters is only the perpetuation of these things in general. That's the core of the difference between labor and labor-power: it is always a distinct I who does the laboring, however alienated that labor might be, but what is exchanged is labor-power as such, in a prescribed duration of time.
[Note toward a longer study: We can actually gauge the strength of the historical workers movement, in its apexes and nadirs, by the degree to which it tried to insist on the inseparability of these two things, insisting that labor-power not be understood via a general calculation of the factory's total hours of surplus-labor but in terms of the concrete labor, and the conditions and length of the working days, of these specific laborers.]
But it always remains a real separation. Unlike, say, a bandsaw in factory, which indeed aids in the circulation of capital. Yet insofar as it is reproduced/maintained (with new parts, a bit of oil, with a mechanic's skill and time), it is in the name of this particular bandsaw continuing to work and do its job. Because it has already been bought in full, it is in the interest of its owner that this very distinct instantiation of bandsaw keep functioning as long as it performs competitively. It must, therefore, be cared for. (From the general perspective of capital, though, the sooner it busts, the better: all the more bandsaws to be made, all the more labor to pour through the forges!)
Laborers: no, from either a local or system-wide perspective. It is of no grand importance if a particular one breaks down, and it just slows down circulation to have to keep it running (via the insistence of political pressures to keep manufacturing at home, via the rarer insistence of other workers to strike if this busted one is not given a modicum of attention or remuneration). Especially when there are new, cheaper models elsewhere. What matters is the reproduction of labor-power in general, both in its local instance (the labor pool in a particular zone) and in its global scale (the hypothetically employable portion of the species). So while it demands there be particular workers (obviously, there can be no such thing as labor-power, and hence no surplus labor, without laborers), it is opposed, violently, to them in their particularity.
It would seem, then, that every step, hour, nickel, and dime toward the perpetuation of the species in general is a step further from that phantom X called "species-being," defined by Marx as that distinct mode of a "being that treats the species as its own essential being." Perversely, however, the very concept of this assumed common ground, this milestone of how far we've gone down the road of alienation, perhaps mimics the exact relation between individual and species on which relations of value and production turn. That is, a being not in accordance with a particular activity (whatever that may be: running, drinking, painting, building houses, murdering, learning physics) that may be at odds with the species as a whole, but rather with a general activity (abstract labor, however brutally real, localized, and experienced it is) dictated by, and dependent upon, an indifference to particular instantiations of the species. In other words, dictated by the essence of the species beyond its existent forms. Species-being, then, may be just the back-projection in which we can faintly glimpse what is materially the case now.
The reproduction of ourselves - the reason (one can't live on antagonism alone) we all individually put up with all this as a class - is, it turns out, an accident of industry. A by-product of the perpetuation of labor-power in general. We throw ourselves headlong into that project, all in hopes of snatching a bit of the leftover, one piece at a time, with which to make a life, a family, a community, a site of other time.
Our labor, too, this shuddering drive, this life: it is the reproduction of slaughtered meat. Yet without rotting, without transforming money itself: just making more than will rot, and more money that will not.
Meanwhile, we turn down the heat, we breed in the freezers, we rattle the bones. The impossible, vile gesture, nestled somewhere in the heart of the matter, the red matter of deciding to go on.
Melodrama . . . must reek with gore.
'Christopher Strong, writing in 1912, declared: “The paranoic who wrote the plays did so because he didn’t know Art from Hank; he did know that people like action, so he gave them more action(and of the same sort) than you would find in an asylum full of delirium tremens fiends and St. Vitus’s dance artists.” Melodrama’s classic iconography, as described by an essayist in 1908, included: “Trap-doors, bridges to be blown up, walls to be scaled, instruments of torture for the persecuted heroines, freight elevators to crush out the lives of the deserving characters, elevated trains to rush upon the prostrate forms of gagged and insensible girls.” A Harper’s Weekly essayist put it concisely in 1890: “Melodrama . . . must reek with gore.”'
--
while villains are strapped to switchboards and
light through the bodies the great white ways of cities
light through the bodies the great white ways of cities
(That is, they become cinema.)
They hit themselves in the golden heads with golden hammers, and then it is time to take off your false faces
Madam Satan Cecil B. DeMille by NilbogLAND
Decadence may not be a correct economic theory, given the alarming lability of capital and the alarming capacity of humans to endure misery en masse. It may be a flawed conception of history, too beholden to a sense of a direction and line of advance, a project that can go south. It may be wishful thinking.
But still. It exists, as real as carbon and abstractions. And it sounds and shines like this.
Property is no longer theft, it is a fire made of meat not to be consumed by the poor
A woman arrested for theft for taking spoiling food thrown out by Tesco during a power outage.
After her arrest Hall said: "Tesco clearly did not want the food. They dumped it and rather than see it go to waste, I thought I could help feed me and my family for a week or two."
---
In the case of Hall and Tesco, the shop said the contents of the bin belonged to them.
Tesco, who send thousands of pounds of leftover meat to be burned for electricity, have said they work to "minimise waste and where possible will seek to reuse and recycle it".
Property is thicker than hunger.
And the material fact of having been discarded isn't enough, no.
"One needs to intend to abandon it."
It is owned straight through the process of decomposition, until the ham goes green and begins to liquify, until it pools in a fetid sludge at the bottom of the bin, seeping a bit out into the street. That is a content that still belongs, beyond any transformation of form, barring one: only exchange, an exchange between two parties, can affect this belonging. For it cannot go unowned, even as it goes unvalued, as it goes wet and reeking.
No, there is a tie that binds beyond the binds of sarcomere, beyond the weave of myosin and actin, even as the meat is burned, not charred on a grill, not consumed in the furnace of a body, but burned plain and simple. A caloric expenditure in the name of energy, true, yet without having to route back through living labor and all its complaints and requests, all its days and nights, just straight back into circulation. Into the circuits that keep the lights burning white, to bathe the unbought meat as if in blue milk, waiting to be burned, never to be disowned.
After all, you don't miss your water until your well runs dry. But you still own it, and all the more so when others lay hands and mouths on what must, out of spite, out of the stubborn rage of ownership, be left to evaporate, such that one can begin to stake claims in the clouds, in the air. In the rain that cuts through that air and splatters what grows and dies below with a staining memory of mine. It does not come out, not even in the rain.
Canine historical melodrama
In which a dog bears murderous witness and clears the name of a servant accused of the crimes of soldiers? Yes.
eventually the higher audiences became interested in seeing what lower audiences had already discovered to be a good show...
Proximity
Arguably the perversity of the Internet is not what it contains. Not in the least. It's how it contains in proximity. Such that an obituary -
and a correct, sad one, at that
- of Gil Scott-Heron, stands centimeters -
although it is not even a marked distance, just an approximation of monitor size and data and how it is to lean
- from a review for a video game -
in which we learn that Punches and kicks are strikes, which take priority over throws. Throws take priority over holds, while holds overpower strike and overall it is given a B, which is to say a neuter, so no one will buy or not buy it more or less because of it, such that it need never have been written in the first place, although It’s a solid package all around, and one that has, for the most part, escaped the troubling sexism that defined earlier entries. There’s no morality at work here
- and just millimeters from an ad that moves unbidden, in which a gorilla holds a shaving device, but it is not meant for him, it is meant for a man, or that thing they imagine to look like one, with a body all smooth and a face half gray and a big leaf covering where the legs meet -
and it is there that you are told to deforest yourself and, in so doing, to reforest the earth, and what does it mean, we bawl like Militina when he says and, and, and what the hell are these pieces we make? if we recognize even in a glancing blow that we exist in a situation in which market research has encouraged Norelco to increase sales by drawing a clear-cut between not just shaving your testicles or purchasing a special electric razor to do that but playing a Flash game featuring a cut-rate Tarzan named Willy, such that you are shaving the foliage around a character who is supposed to stand in for a penis, yet who is himself a full human, such that there is an impossible transference of subtraction from landscape to crotch, between that playing and between them giving $0.25 to plant trees, without specifying where but with specifying only up to $75,000 -
and this, all this, is something over which our eyes flicker at least a dozen times a day.
All this.
How can that which we mean by care for one another not be a total abjuration of what is.
And how can that mean more than a morality at work here. For it means too much to be just or only that.
and a correct, sad one, at that
- of Gil Scott-Heron, stands centimeters -
although it is not even a marked distance, just an approximation of monitor size and data and how it is to lean
- from a review for a video game -
in which we learn that Punches and kicks are strikes, which take priority over throws. Throws take priority over holds, while holds overpower strike and overall it is given a B, which is to say a neuter, so no one will buy or not buy it more or less because of it, such that it need never have been written in the first place, although It’s a solid package all around, and one that has, for the most part, escaped the troubling sexism that defined earlier entries. There’s no morality at work here
- and just millimeters from an ad that moves unbidden, in which a gorilla holds a shaving device, but it is not meant for him, it is meant for a man, or that thing they imagine to look like one, with a body all smooth and a face half gray and a big leaf covering where the legs meet -
and it is there that you are told to deforest yourself and, in so doing, to reforest the earth, and what does it mean, we bawl like Militina when he says and, and, and what the hell are these pieces we make? if we recognize even in a glancing blow that we exist in a situation in which market research has encouraged Norelco to increase sales by drawing a clear-cut between not just shaving your testicles or purchasing a special electric razor to do that but playing a Flash game featuring a cut-rate Tarzan named Willy, such that you are shaving the foliage around a character who is supposed to stand in for a penis, yet who is himself a full human, such that there is an impossible transference of subtraction from landscape to crotch, between that playing and between them giving $0.25 to plant trees, without specifying where but with specifying only up to $75,000 -
and this, all this, is something over which our eyes flicker at least a dozen times a day.
All this.
How can that which we mean by care for one another not be a total abjuration of what is.
And how can that mean more than a morality at work here. For it means too much to be just or only that.
Under the foam paving stones, the foam beach
Two related ideas for how to entertain ourselves. To be played in city centers, preferably during marches.
1. Spanish Civil War LARPing
[hopefully no one really wants to play an Alfonsist. So we simply play CNT/FAI and imagine those not in the game to be the nationalists they are. And we will be strict: there is only one Durruti per game, but it rotates. Full dress is required. Breaking character is not allowed. Related games: Novemberrevolution, Paris Commune: The Return, Bologna '77]
2. Nerf Molotovs
[Nerf paving stones also acceptable. A technically legal volley ricochets off the banks, the jails, the stores.]
But like a snowball fight when there is ice at hand, you just never know. You just never know, she said, laughing.
Bay of Rage
The only possible response to the antinomies of anti-austerity politics – which breakdown all too often into a fight between anti-tax and pro-welfare populisms – is to say that if we had direct, immediate access to such things, we would need neither state provision nor its powers of taxation. Only when capital is a natural, unsurpassable horizon does this appear as a real problem.
Keep eyes and hands turned toward Bay of Rage in months to come.
[In addition, for those who haven't been following, this is the sword hanging over Oakland's libraries:
The Mayor’s fiscal year 2011-13 Proposed Budget has three scenarios. Scenario A is the “All Cuts Budget” and is the one that fundamentally affects the Library and its services. It indicates a fiscal year 2011-12 General Fund appropriation for the Library of about $3.6 million and no money from Measure Q.
Measure Q was placed on the ballot by the City Council in 2003 for the collection of a special parcel tax for the library, which in 2010-11, will raise just under $14 million annually, and, to raise those funds, the city is required to fund the library in the amount of about $9 million out of the general fund.
Under Scenario A, the following services will be cut:
- 13 branch libraries are scheduled to close: Asian, Brookfield, Chavez, Eastmont, Elmhurst, Golden Gate, Lakeview, Martin Luther King, Melrose, Montclair, Piedmont Avenue, Temescal, West Oakland
- 4 remaining libraries – Main, Rockridge, Dimond, and 81st Avenue – would only be open 3 days a week
- Main Library will close its Children’s Room, Teen Zone, and Oakland History Room
- The Tool Lending Library and the African-American Museum and Library at Oakland (AAMLO) will close
- Second Start Adult Literacy will close
- Limited funding for new books, DVDs or other materials purchased
- Discontinuation of electronic services like downloadable books and databases
That's right, thirteen libraries. The reduction of an entire library system for a 400,000 person city to 4 libraries open 3 days a week. Sometimes when we speak about class war, we're accused of being dramatic. Those are often the same people who think that the poor just need to work harder and educate themselves, and that those who oppose the current order need to learn their history. Oh, you mean in places like libraries, respectively in a "Children's Room" and "Teen Zone" or in a "History Room"?
This coming Friday:
Friday, June 3, 7 pm – Silent funeral procession for the library, starts at 20th St. and Broadway. Bring a library book and wear all black to mourn the potential loss of Oakland’s library services.
followed by
Oakland: Friday June 3, during Art Murmur
- Gather at 7:30, Broadway @ Telegraph
- Guerrilla Film Screening at 9:30 following march
World Melodrama Film Series Presents: What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984)
[last one of the year, and a very fitting end, starting with one of the more apt melodrama titles out there. A bisected we continues the series next fall - I will be in Napoli for a year and hence can only join in spirit/digital presence, but Erik will be taking things in a more interplanetary direction... We're not done with melodrama, by a long-shot, as it is never done with us: that's the point. It keeps coming back for more.]
A grotesquely parodic amalgamation of melodrama and Spanish black comedies of the 1950s and ‘60s (which, as it happens, derived from Italian neo-realism), What Have I Done to Deserve This? was Pedro Almodóvar’s fifth feature-length film and the first to make a big splash on the international film festival and art house circuit. Nothing seems to be going right in the life of the harassed working mother, Gloria (Carmen Maura): her taxi-driver husband is obsessed with Hitler and doesn’t mind sharing his admiration for the dead German dictator with his unfazed customers; one of her sons is a drug-dealer, while the other (younger) sibling seems to like older men . . . a lot; a prostitute neighbor (and friend) convinces Gloria that she should be a paid observer when one of her more exhibitionistic clients comes calling (see above); a little girl upstairs seems to have Carrie-like telekinetic powers; and Gloria herself can’t stop popping No-Doze pills. Set in and around an immense housing project in Madrid, What Have I Done to Deserve This? memorably synthesizes many of the melodramatic tropes, plots, and characters we’ve been exploring this quarter into one giant mess. As ever, not to be missed.
Tuesday, May 31st
Stevenson 150, 8 PM
Okay. Tell me which authors are romantic and which realistic. Ibsen?
Romantic.
Lord Byron?
He’s a realist.
Goethe?
A realist as well.
Balzac?
Romantic. See how easy it is?
A grotesquely parodic amalgamation of melodrama and Spanish black comedies of the 1950s and ‘60s (which, as it happens, derived from Italian neo-realism), What Have I Done to Deserve This? was Pedro Almodóvar’s fifth feature-length film and the first to make a big splash on the international film festival and art house circuit. Nothing seems to be going right in the life of the harassed working mother, Gloria (Carmen Maura): her taxi-driver husband is obsessed with Hitler and doesn’t mind sharing his admiration for the dead German dictator with his unfazed customers; one of her sons is a drug-dealer, while the other (younger) sibling seems to like older men . . . a lot; a prostitute neighbor (and friend) convinces Gloria that she should be a paid observer when one of her more exhibitionistic clients comes calling (see above); a little girl upstairs seems to have Carrie-like telekinetic powers; and Gloria herself can’t stop popping No-Doze pills. Set in and around an immense housing project in Madrid, What Have I Done to Deserve This? memorably synthesizes many of the melodramatic tropes, plots, and characters we’ve been exploring this quarter into one giant mess. As ever, not to be missed.
Tuesday, May 31st
Stevenson 150, 8 PM
Work Drama
Brief lessons on capital and antagonism (albeit not very Trontian, which would have to place "Drama" first), courtesy of a library classification of a film about phonographs and circulation, assembly lines and fucking up, and being workless - rather than being worker - as the base condition of social life.
1. There will be drama.
2. And there will be more of the similar, always. But they will be seen as items, not as relations.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
