The world burns. The world floods. Crop yields are ravaged by the chaos of climate crisis and capitalist war. Millions are being priced out of the means of survival. Starvation looms. The misery is breaking out along the familiar fault lines of race, class, gender, nation, and species. Fossil fuels remain the lifeblood of this dying world. Every passing day bears witness to the incipient mass extinction. Civilization appears to be reaching its breaking point. And we are communists.
We are communists. We are not ‘socialists’ because such a ‘transition’ is an ideological fantasy and a practical impossibility. It is also not desirable. We are not anarchists. Certainly, we are anti-state, but we see the state as a political form taken by the community of capital and not as an ‘autonomous’ or transhistorical centralization and concentration of ‘power’. Yet, to be clear on the matter, our affinities and sympathies lie with the Party of Anarchy and never with any Party of Order, even the ‘left’, democratic socialist, or nominally ‘Communist’ variety. We don’t mind being called anarchists. We do mind being called socialists.
Communism is not a ‘new economy’. Communism is not a mode of production. Communism is not a form of management. Communism is not a ‘new society’ or an ideal state of affairs. It is nothing more than the real death of capital. It is the real movement—the practical activity of the dispossessed—that abolishes the present state of things. Communism is a danse macabre at the end of this capitalist hellworld.
For us, real communism does not warrant such a qualifier. Unfortunately, after decades of recuperation, counterinsurgency, economic restructuring, and political decomposition, the term ‘communism’ appears to have been depleted of revolutionary social content, leaving it an empty signifier for political projection from both the right and ‘left’. At worst, ‘communism’ appears as an anachronism, a politics of a bygone era—the post-war boom, the apogee of the classical workers movement, Cold War statecraft, and all that. The ‘left’’ has abandoned ‘communism’ as an ideological artifact, to a period bracketed somewhere between the revolutions of 1848 and the decline of the Soviet Union. In the subsequent three decades, cycles of struggle have taken the form of autonomy, direct democracy, anti/alter-globalization, and direct-action movements, each laying claim to an inheritance to struggles that came before, but also promising a decisive break from the ‘old ways’—another world and another politics were supposed to have been possible…
But capital forecloses the possibility of such ‘independent’ or ‘autonomous’ proliferations of better worlds, external but parallel to the hellscape, supposedly forged through collective action and ‘community’ building. The only community is the material community of capital. The repeated social, ecological, and political economic crises of the last decades have been cruel reminders that politics operates within the constraints of this moving contradiction. The politics of capitalist stagnation, crisis, and decline are an (anti)-politics of punctuated insurgency, atomization, ecological nihilism, desperation, and romanticism.
Everywhere the world revolts against itself. But revolt is mediated by proletarian composition, which is to say its decomposition. The only ‘unity’ of the proletariat is the unity of dispossession. Racialization, gender, and sexuality are real fragmentations and not ‘ideological’ barriers to ‘class unity’. It is, in fact, these fragmentations and decompositions, backed by the force of the state, that mediate the capitalist class relation and tend to condition the possibility of revolt today. Unity for the proletariat is only achieved in the moment of its self-abolition, in the abolition of capital. It is antagonism, dissension, separation, and speciation that form the terrain of struggle and appear as a constraint on insurrectionary possibilities.
Unity is an ideological apparition. It cannot be achieved by appeals to formal ‘organization’ or ‘building class power’. Neither is it achieved in the fleeting moments of open riots, in looting, or in conflict with the police. Race, gender, and colony are not dissolved through ‘traitorous’ acts alone. They permeate the entire fabric of the capitalist world. Cycles of struggle are not independent of capital’s reproduction but are part and parcel of that process. They are no less segregated than the home, the neighborhood, the market, or the factory floor. Struggle remains a part of capital’s fragmented geography. It is a delusion to hold that whiteness or heteropatriarchy disappear in the tear gas. That does not mean we resign ourselves to a politics of reaction. It means only acknowledging that unity-in-dispossession can only be realized and simultaneously overcome with the production of communism–an exit from the cycles of struggle and recuperation that attend capitalist reproduction.
We are not partisans of ‘collapse’ or ‘acceleration’, politics that separate the ‘true human community’ from the autonomous movement of capitalist decline. The dispossessed are in reality a part of this movement. ‘Humanity’ itself is an abstraction only practically adequate to the world of capital. Communism will end this speciation and the racialized regime of the human. Ours is a politics of decomposition. Communism arrives when the world of capital decays from the inside out. When we practice communist measures–revolt against the state and state actors, attacks on capital accumulation and circulation, defense of the land and nonhuman, expropriations of means of survival—we practice decomposition.
If you are interested in connecting, reach out to decompositions@riseup.net.
ffo: anti-state communism, anarchy, Marxism, ‘historical materialism’, Marxian political economy, ‘ultra-left’ theory, left communism, ‘insurrectionary’ theory, critiques of racial capitalism and colonial-capitalism, ‘radical ecology’/‘radical environmentalism’, social ecology (sans Bookchin, sorry), critiques of ‘civilization’ (a terribly imprecise term of art), ‘green anarchy’ (w/o the ‘primitivism’ ), animal liberation (=/= veganism), anti-work, pro- and post-Situationist theory