#Nicos Poulantzas

[probablyasocialecologist]

Poulantzas expands Gramsci’s notion of crises by discussing their threefold character: economic, political/ideological and state crises. These forms of crisis are not directly related. Economic crises do not automatically become political crises nor do the latter immediately become crises of the state. Neither do the different forms of crisis necessarily have to coincide. Given the interconnectedness of the state and civil society, he does not assign priority to struggles that are either inside or outside the state, and, instead, suggests that these “two forms of struggle must be combined”. Hence, if Gramsci argued that the dislocation of consent in civil society was to be achieved by an alternative hegemonic project and from there advanced to political society, Poulantzas added that subaltern groups could occupy “centres of resistance” within the state, which were to be strategically coordinated and increased in number until they become “real centres of power”, capable of staging “real breaks” with the established order – or, in the terminology of Erik Olin Wright, whose work in many ways built upon Poulantzas – “ruptural transformations”. As a corollary, Poulantzas encouraged both the amplification of subaltern voices within state institutions and representative democracy as well as popular movements for establishing new forms of deliberative elements, including principles of direct democracy. While this may involve a “war of position” (Gramsci) within the state itself, this does not mean that the struggles in neighbourhoods, communities, workplaces, campuses and so on are to be neglected.

Max Koch, Rethinking state-civil society relations

[brunojordanposts]

La «reforma estructural» y el problema de la estrategia de la izquierda ante el fin de una época

Por Ed Rooksby Investigador, profesor en la universidad de York (Reino Unido) y escritor socialista (1975-2021). Ver semblanza de Jacobin en su memoria.     A pesar de sus muchas diferencias, las formaciones de izquierda que han avanzado políticamente en Europa en los últimos años –Syriza, Podemos, el Bloque de Izquierda portugués, el movimiento que se ha cohesionado en torno a Jeremy…

[veryslowreader]

Political Power and Social Classes by Nicos Poulantzas

Ensalada Baudelaire  

[gayhomebody]

Books I've read in 2024

'Bleak House' by Charles Dickens

'Bandits' by Eric Hobsbawm

'Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson' by George Jackson

'The Violence of Britishness: Racism, Borders and the Conditions of Citizenship' by Nadya Ali

'Black Power' by Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton

History Today February 2024 Vol. 74 Issue 2

'The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian' by Nirad C. Chaudhuri

'Booth' by Karen Joy Fowler

'Making Sense of Russia's Invasion of Ukraine' by Paul Le Blanc

History Today March 2024 Vol. 74 Issue 3

'Walter Benjamin's Archive'

Granta 15, Spring 1985, 'The Fall of Saigon' by James Fenton

'Kitchen Confidential: Insider's Edition' by Anthony Bourdain

'End British Support for Zionism, Isolate the Israeli State' by FRFI

'East into Upper East: Plain Tales from New York and New Delhi' by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

'From the Four Corners' by Jan Morris

'Common Sense and The American Crisis I' by Thomas Paine

'Renaissance Europe, 1480-1520' by J. R. Hale

'Reformation Europe, 1517-1559' by G. R. Elton

'Europe Divided, 1559-1598' by J. H. Elliott

'Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938' by Stephen F. Cohen

'A Short History of Nearly Everything' by Bill Bryson

'Israel's War on Gaza' by Gilbert Achcar

'What does Israel fear from Palestine?' by Raja Shehadeh

'Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third International and the Problem of Fascism' by Nicos Poulantzas

'A Grand Tour of the Roman Empire' by Marcus Sidonius Falx with Jerry Toner

'The Roman Empire' by Colin Wells

'Lessons of October' by Leon Trotsky (Reread)

'Coming up for Air' by George Orwell

'Fathers and Sons' by Ivan Turgenev

[beguines]

Productive force determinism and the base-superstructure model continued to haunt Marxist debates about the state until the 1970s, where scholars such as Nicos Poulantzas, Ellen Meiksins Wood, members of the Conference on Socialist Economics and participants in the German state derivation debate parted ways with orthodox Marxism and opened up new theoretical perspectives. They all attempted to carve out a path between the crude instrumentalism of classical Marxism and the social democratic view of the state as a neutral arena, and many of them did so by moving beyond the exclusive occupation with the content of state policy, i.e., the question of who benefits from this policy. Instead, they posed the more fundamental question of the very form of the state, a question which was aptly formulated by Evgeny B. Pashukanis as early as 1924:

"[w]hy does class rule not remain what it is, the factual subjugation of one section of the population by the other? Why does it assume the form of official state rule, or—which is the same thing—why does the machinery of state coercion not come into being as the private machinery of the ruling class; why does it detach itself from the ruling class and take on the form of an impersonal apparatus of public power, separate from society?"

Such an approach allows us to circumvent the artificial conceptual gulf between the economic and the political taken for granted in both classical Marxism and Poulantzas's Althusserian social ontology, in which the base-superstructure-model and the distinction between an economic and a political "level" or "instance" was supposed to be a feature of all modes of production. In an important contribution to these debates, Wood demonstrated the inadequacy of the base-superstructure-model and suggested to conceptualise the separation of the political and the economic in capitalism as "the differentiation of political functions themselves and their separate allocation to the private economic sphere and the public sphere of the state". Bernhard Blanke, Ulrich Jürgens and Hans Kastendiek likewise rejected "the commonplace (scientific) notion of the relation between politics and economics [that] contains the assumption that only politics has to do with domination, that economics on the other hand has to do with 'material laws'". In general, the participants in the state-derivation debate proceeded from "an interpretation of Marx's Capital not as a theory of the 'economic' but as a theory of the social relations of capitalist society", in the words of Simon Clarke. This acknowledgment of the social nature of the political and the economic is a fundamental prerequisite not only of a theory of economic power but also of a theory of the state.

Søren Mau, Mute Compulsion: A Theory of the Economic Power of Capital

[marxmadness2023]

MARX MADNESS - WEEK 1

[collectionoftulips]

Any historical fiction or non fiction books recommendations? I'm into Disney wars.

Hmmm... I remember loooooving Memoirs of Cleopatra by Margaret George when I read that years ago. That's such a fantastic book and I remember feeling really transported to ancient Egypt and it was great. I still haven't read the last few percentages of the book (even though it's been years) because I just cannot bear to see it end.

A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende was amazing.

The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See was also great and was a pandemic read I really enjoyed as well, though it's really harrowing but stayed with me.

Non-fiction books there are a lot...

Orientalism by Edward Said is a classic for a reason.

She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth by Helen Castor was a fun read, but I'm also a medieval history nerd.

I've also read a lot of Stuart Hall, Nicos Poulantzas and Nancy Fraser if you like social theory/philosophy.

Perhaps an obvious one but I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy is brilliant but heavy.

Hope any of these sound interesting and if you have any recommendations of books you like, feel free to send them my way, I'm definitely trying to expand my reading habits.

[anotherworldnowblog]

15

WE WILL NEVER BE FORGIVEN

“Although the fascist phenomenon can be resisted and avoided, there is a point in its growth after which it appears difficult to turn it back. The moment is not that at which fascism actually comes into power; the accession to power seems such a simple final act, occurring only when the essentials are already decided and done with, in short, a confirmation of a victory already won.” Nicos Poulantzas Fascism and Dictatorship, p. 66

PART II

The defeat of the George Floyd uprising seems everywhere to signal the closure of a cycle of struggle stretching back at least to Ferguson, maybe Rodney King, with its roots going all the way to Watts. Whether the George Floyd uprising was the end of a chain of urban rebellions and circulation struggles or the first link in a quantitatively and qualitatively new series of nationwide uprisings remains to be seen. How and when the proletariat announces its return is not clear. Troublingly, what has happened since 2020 is increasingly so.

On January 6th, the closest thing in contemporary American history to a mass fascist street action coalesced in a foolish attempt to overturn the election results. We laugh at the ill-fated coup at our own risk however, as by this point the proletariat was entirely defeated and the right-wing antidemocratic attack was only foiled by a combination of the fascists’ astounding stupidity and the incoming regime's control over local police power. Fascists are always fools. It is the fact that their goals so closely align to those of the power elite and that their methods violently liberate the movement of capital from its fragile humanistic ties that make them dangerous, not their intelligence. Despite its admittedly farcical appearance, the effects of this coup-attempt were absolutely profound. The media cynically used this event to wipe clean the rebellion of the previous summer from the memories of nearly all Americans, to strongly associate “insurrection” with right-wing activity, to forcefully reverse what had then become a common disdain for police, and to neutralize all left-critique of the incoming administration. The left-wing of liberalism, the fraction of the community of capital that had momentarily sided with the proletariat in a moment of acute crisis, is completely disentangled from radical politics and psychically sealed off from protest itself.[1] As will become an obvious tendency in what follows, the gains of the working class in the period of crisis and its aftermath, both in terms of consciousness and in terms of policy, are steadily and methodically reversed in bipartisan fashion.

“Start the forgetting machine!” - Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism (p. 32)

The consolidation of the victory of capital over the working class unfolds in cascading action across multiple fronts. It proceeds relatively uninhibited because of the persistent unity of the various capitalist fractions. In the interest of concision, I will henceforth abandon a rigidly chronological presentation.

The first and most direct response to the working class rebellion in 2020 is the passage of several bills granting immunity to anyone who uses their vehicle to run over protestors demonstrating in the street, first in Iowa, Oklahoma, Florida, and with at least eight more bills across the country being debated across the country's state houses in 2021.[2] The significance of such bills cannot be overstated. After the 2017 Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville culminated in the use of an automobile as a weapon of mass murder, a tactic formerly associated exclusively with the specter of Islamic terror, elite liberals of all political persuasions recoiled in horror. However, as we have seen in the above, it would not be long before this all-too American technique of violence would be repeated, this time against a far more militant anti-racist offensive. The right to murder protestors is being quietly legalized under the guise of protecting an individual’s right to free movement and often even more cynically, by invoking the hypothetical needs of imaginary emergency vehicles. The pedestrian, the cyclist, are sacrificed at the fascist altar of the internal combustion engine, a trend further accelerated by the destruction of public transit during COVID-19. As usual, Adorno’s words read like prophecy: “which auto-driver has not felt the temptation, in the power of the motor, to run over the vermin of the street – passersby, children, bicyclists? In the movements which machines demand from their operators, lies already that which is violent, crashing, propulsively unceasing in Fascist mistreatment.”[3] The temptation then is all the more powerful when the ‘vermin of the street’ is not merely passive but actively attempting to weaponize a constructed interruption in those violent, crashing movements, which otherwise ceaselessly accelerate the flows of global commodities, towards ends quite at odds with the valorization of capital; in a word, liberation.

Regrettably, this violence is far from an exclusively petit bourgeois pastime. Fractions of the proletariat are pit against one another as increasingly large numbers of urban workers come to rely on delivery and driving gigs, a sector swollen further during the pandemic. The city street is all but erased as social space, transformed into an exclusive conveyor of private goods carried by independent contractors with overlapping commitments, coerced by the mute compulsions of capital to at times restore the free flow of commodities with violence. The rural highway remains a blood-stained latticework criss-crossed by drowsy laborers called to traverse ever-increasing distances to balance employment and disintegrating familial ties. Studies indicate that the roadways of the United States have never been more deadly, a tragedy compounded by the fact that the great majority of this increase in auto traffic is nothing but our own life energies confronting us, and killing us, as services marketed as simplification.[4] That this machine’s victims are now willing, and legally empowered, to murder those who would dare gum-up the gnashing of its steel teeth is a tragedy of anthropological proportion.

This rapid movement to sweep political struggle from the streets of America apparently knows no partisan loyalty. The militant struggle in Atlanta to Stop Cop City and the nationwide street action aimed at halting the genocide in Gaza have galvanized hesitant Democrats to abandon all pretense at connection to their grassroots and join Republicans in criminalizing constitutionally protected and normatively accepted forms of public protest. In 2023, Georgia Democrats pushed the meaning of domestic terrorism to include attendance at a music festival or muddy shoes[5] and in 2024, New York Democrats will likely level at any protest that “blocks a road or a bridge” terrorism enhancements, this coming amidst increasingly infrastructure-intelligent anti-war mobilization.[6] The latter move, a continuation of and qualitative leap-up from the endorsement of stochastic terror by state Republicans, is a direct response to the collective awareness of systemic choke points in the networks of circulation gained by the working class in the latest cycle of struggles; an attempt to dispatch with this desperate counter-riposte to decades of deindustrialization and dispersion that has all-but destroyed the effectiveness of the proletariat’s traditional, production-point tactics.

Furthermore, just in the past several weeks, the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles has announced her intent to ban protective face masks at protests and the Democratic governor of the state of New York has signaled her intention to ban masks from public transit entirely.[7] Such shocking policies, not only whiplash-inducing for their incongruity with all conceptions of public health and civic responsibility, ostensibly designed to combat crime and ensure accountability for largely fictitious acts of anti-semitic violence, are obviously intended to chill protected speech acts and guarantee the effectiveness of facial recognition software in tracking the movements of protest attendees. It is no coincidence that these suggestions come on the heels of an anti-imperialist protest movement that is militantly imbuing the struggle against white supremacy, the struggle of which the George Floyd Rebellion was but one battle, with a refreshingly internationalist perspective. Such obscene policy measures, in addition to signaling an ever-deepening political unity between the two domestic political parties when it comes to shirking government responsibility for social welfare and crushing working class protest, accelerate the devastating impact of COVID on those with pre-existing conditions, amounting to a policy of murderous social cleansing on top of the troubling implications for any who dare dissent. Politically, the Democrats’ pathetic tailing of Republican reaction will almost certainly earn them no additional votes at the ballot box. But their willingness to abandon COVID-era convictions at the first sign of working-class internationalism is quite telling indeed. It is regretful that such clarity is achieved at so high a price.

American economic policy in the wake of the pandemic (which I submit also includes intentional prolongation of the War in Ukraine), that has, among other things, led to inflationary pressures that have wiped out Covid-era wage gains, called forth unprecedented state intervention to stabilize big and small businesses, and generally sent stocks stratospheric, must also be seen as part of the offensive of capital against the working class and as an expression of exceptional bourgeois unity.[8] The concentration of capital, accelerated by inflationary pressures, pushes us towards fascism by 1. unifying rentier and industrial capital (platform capital and hardgoods producers unified through mergers, bundles, and partnerships)[9], as well as national with transnational capital (friendshoring)[10] 2. negatively impacting and threatening to cast into the proletariat the petit bourgeois, thereby spontaneously developing shallowly “anti-capitalist” ideas in a vengeful middle class, the National Socialists of tomorrow’s America who merely wish to swap the current elites with their own, and 3. reversing gains of the proletariat, prompting economistic and defensive struggles, as well as by expanding the national and international army of surplus labor (all evident in an erosion of purchasing power; digitized productivity monitoring introduced under the cover of COVID-19 exceptionalism; the repeal of state child labor law[11]; immigration policy that divides the proletariat into tiers of formality and fixes certain workers within preferable national legal systems; the lawsuit seeking to destroy the NLRA brought by SpaceX, Amazon, Trader Joe’s[12]; multifront international warfare creating huge migratory movements of refugees; etc.) as a means of reinforcing and deepening the domination of capital over labor.

“It is characteristic of the rise of fascism that the struggle of the bourgeoisie against the working class assumes an increasingly political nature, while the working-class struggle against the bourgeoisie falls further and further back into the domain of economic demands… it is the economic struggle which progressively assumes the dominant role in the struggle of the working class.” -Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship (p. 142)

Meanwhile, the chauvinism of the American right deepens, and it finds ever more dangerous expression for its hatreds structurally, even under Democratic administration. In fact, the far-right agenda seems to have had far more success nationally under the current Democratic administration than during Trump’s tenure. Between 2021 and 2023, 129 anti-trans bills were passed in states across America. We have no way to know the true number of murders and suicides these bills have led to–we know of far too many as it is–but we can say the United States is no doubt becoming an intolerably dangerous place for queer life. Even President Obama was willing to credibly threaten to withhold critical federal education funds from state governments who refused to follow the administration’s guidance with respect to the usage of bathrooms by trans and gender nonconforming people. This powerful intervention to protect and normalize trans life, perhaps as a means to protect an image of capitalism as tolerant and progressive, was immediately reversed by the Trump administration in 2017.[13] Today, the Biden administration has done absolutely nothing to forestall the ongoing attempt to erase trans people from existence in State Houses across America, suggesting a new ruling class consensus to abandon the illusion of a progressive capitalist culture, and perhaps liberalism itself.

In 2022, Roe vs. Wade was overturned by the United States Supreme Court, all but condemning working class pregnant people to carry their babies to term or go broke attempting to procure abortion services in one of a dwindling number of safe states. As of now, 21 states “ban abortion or restrict the procedure earlier in pregnancy than the standard set by Roe v. Wade,” with no indication that the adoption of such policies are slowing down.[14] It is far from controversial or groundbreaking to insist on anti-abortion policies as class warfare. The lack of safe, free abortion services divides the working class; the Bolsheviks institutionalized recognition of this basic fact in the very first years of the Soviet experiment over a century ago. Capital does not merely homogenize the laboring class as labor-power; it ceaselessly differentiates it along the axes of race, sex/gender, and age. Fascism, as the political expression of an exceptionally class-conscious ruling class, ruthlessly exploits and expands such divisions. That such a strategy emerges as a compliment to traditionalist reaction to the social atomization of the capitalist system it seeks to renew and defend is simply an example of the extraordinary opportunism of our bourgeoisie. It is an ideological pivot around which the petit bourgeoisie can align itself with a capitalist class that cares little about what is traditional and only about maximizing the rate of exploitation domestically.

On the southern border medieval death traps are erected, placed there by far-right politicians, and defended against the regulation of federal guidance by National Guards of neighboring and distant states. Migrants that have made it beyond our ramparts are shipped into the city centers of various Democratic mayors where they are subject to subhuman levels of care and a brutal, a shadow labor regime, absolutely maximizing rates of exploitation and dragging the wages of citizen-workers down, fanning the flames of racism and xenophobia across all of the national classes. Even the farthest-left members of our political system can seem only able to refer to these newly-arrived proletarian faces, often entire families, in the language of the far-right: as a crisis. Yet, far from becoming the constitutional crisis suggested at Eagle Pass, murderous border policy, irrational from the perspective of national economic interest but rational from the perspective of protecting the consistency of the national ideology, becomes another point of practical unity for Democratic and Republican officials alike. In fact, what marginal differences exist between the two Amerikan politikal parties on border policy allow the ruling class to have it both ways: a zone of blood sacrifice is established along the southern border for the ritualistic simulation of protection of the White body politic, while the majority of migrants do make it into our country for the sole purpose of superexploitation. These huddled masses are then weaponized in the cynical assault on the basis of the domestic laboring classes’ bargaining power: solidarity.

No matter; this convenient capitulation of the Democratic Party to Republican bloodlust has not dislodged the purely spectacular appearance of intense partisan division, nor has it stopped the wealthiest capitalist in this country from articulating anti-semitic conspiracy theories about the providence of this influx of migrants. Elon Musk, regrettably one of the more powerful of the bourgeoisie, appears to be spontaneously recreating National Socialism (With American Characteristics) in a haze of his own weed smoke. At various points, he has more or less explicitly called the immigration of people from the global south a Jewish conspiracy to destroy American prosperity and traditional family values, coming increasingly close to simply tweeting out the 14 words and decisively aligning himself with the ultraright fractions of the petit bourgeois and capitalist elements of the Republican party.

But Elon Musk is not alone in signaling his preference for a Republican presidency in the coming election; Jamie Diamond of JP Morgan,[15] Vice-Chair of Black Rock Philipp Hildebrand, and many other capitalists in the wake of conferences such as Davos have more or less openly declared their preference for a Trump victory in 2024.[16] Nonetheless, Trump’s most consistent base of support has long been that of the small-business owner, not the large capitalist. His electoral strength is his appearance as a disruptor, and it is exactly this trait which makes large capital uneasy. It is in this light which we can begin to understand the logic of Trump’s baffling selection of JD Vance as his 2024 running mate. The choice of a man so obviously disliked by the general public can only be made sense of as an attempt to further signal to the bourgeoisie what type of dictatorship a second Trump presidency would really be: a dictatorship of capital. Vance is, above all else, a creature of large tech capital, and much more so than Trump, a man who is wholly up for sale. If big capital continues to warm to a Trump presidency, despite Harris now backing away from all of Biden’s regulatory commitments, this would represent a development in the radicalization of capital that was unfathomable in 2016, when the prospect of a Trump presidency nearly crashed global markets. The ruling class is now beginning to sense both what kind of violence is truly necessary to restore profit rates to acceptable levels and that Trumpism poses no direct threat to the capitalist economic order.

We've also seen an assault on proletarian culture come in the form of the RICO charges brought against the YSL group, and Young Thug in particular. The charges are murder and organized crime and the prosecution is relying very heavily on the lyrical content of Young Thug’s songs to make their case. Rap music has long been an artistic form that creatively and dramatically expressed the harsh realities of racialized economic exclusion, the experience of savage competition accelerated by decades of neoliberal policy, and the psychic ramifications of ghettoization and state violence, even if it’s rarely presented in such terms. That this form of expression, one which is explicitly black, militant, and working class, is being attacked by the state is yet another symptom of the fascist spiral, here found at the point of legal-cultural intersection. While most rap music is not partisan, neither is the class itself, and the music is most certainly aggressively proletarian. Even lyrics about cars and money must be recognized as expressions of working class desire, specifically a desire to get out of the trenches or the mud one came from. It is important to recall that there once was a robust, self-consciously proletarian culture in this country, which often produced songs about fighting cops, offing your boss, and killing fascists. Such songs might have once been sung at red taverns, or union halls, or even at the dinner table with red-diaper babies bewilderedly looking on in hand-me-down high-chairs. While the fragmentation of the class and structural shifts in the economy have pushed such traditions to the margins of memory, we still find that vulgarity, militancy, and violence are not uncommon themes in the working class anthems of today, “fuck the police” being just one such example. To produce such content is a freedom we have long enjoyed thanks to the liberalism of our national bourgeoisie (and perhaps their own self-confidence, now rattled) and if we want to protect it, we can begin by recognizing the prosecution of Young Thug as a dangerous escalation in the assault on proletarian speech.

“what the fuck you mean put my gun down muthafucka? you must ain’t heard about Trayvon Martin you muthafucka” “When they killed my nigga, I seen the footage on the tape Man I must've threw up everything I ever ate” “R.I.P. Mike Brown, fuck the Cops Screamin' R.I.P Bennie shootin' up a block” “Hey, this that slime shit, hey YSL shit, hey Killin' 12 shit, hey Fuck a jail shit, hey”

This naturally brings us back to Atlanta. What is happening in Atlanta is nothing short of a nightmare. A Cop City is being rammed down the throats of an entire major metropolis, at the expense of the whole population's civil liberties, clean air, drinkable water, navigable streets. All democratic resistance has been shut down by Democratic politicians. Restrained clandestine activity and constitutionally protected street action have been met equally with the most intense repression since the George Floyd uprising. Unlike the George Floyd Rebellion, this struggle has generated a lasting unity across the various resistance interest groups, ideologies, and identities because of the intersectionality of the object of its opposition and an explicit and hard-won agreement to embrace a diversity of tactics—perhaps a direct response to the failure of the George Floyd Uprising and specifically the self-defeating division around responses to the police murder of Rayshard Brooks.

The tact taken by the state is notable here: rather than fragment the movement by erasing the intersectional content of the struggle through slight of hand (e.g. moving the center outside of the black, working-class neighborhood, or away from such an ecologically important site), they have decided to crush the movement with terrorism, murder, and demoralization. The construction of this center is a gesture. International capital and bipartisan politicians have come together to send a message while they prepare for a new cycle of struggle, one which we can expect will proceed on greatly expanded foundations, in the near future; the message reads: you will never be forgiven. In the last year alone, dozens of protesters have been rounded up on RICO charges with terror enhancements with hardly any evidence at all of wrongdoing. A protester, a militant forest defender, a queer person of color, a revolutionary named Tortuguita, was murdered for their unwavering commitment to the Earth and its creatures. Now, bail funds are under attack. This novel technology, mainstreamed during the May-June Rebellion, has served as a lifeline for working-class protesters assured of their righteousness, but no longer of their freedom. Make no mistake, the assault on bail-funds is a test-case for the nation as these funds made possible the sustained rebellion over the course of the months of May-August of 2020, during which well over 10,000 people were arrested. Today, huge swaths of pristine forest have been mercilessly cleared as construction of the police playhouse enters its early stages. To share a belief is now seditious conspiracy. To pool resources is organized crime. And to defend the earth is now terrorism. These are some of the tentative outcomes of the ongoing struggle against Cop City in Atlanta.

“One has to understand that the fascist arrangement tolerates the existence of no valid revolutionary activity.” -George Jackson, Blood In My Eye (p. 138)

One last, but certainly not final, expression of the rising unity of capital and the resurgence of American fascism is the Watermelon Scare, or the reaction to domestic Palestinian liberation activity. Artists have lost shows, workers have lost jobs, unions have been sued by their employers, schools are being investigated by their national boards, insufficiently reactionary Heads of Ivy League institutions are cut down and replaced with more pliant personnel responsive only to the dictates of capital, and protest is further criminalized in the name of preventing anti-semitism. My words can hardly keep pace with events. The masks are all off and we are treated to front row seats to a dispiriting disappearing act; bourgeois democracy reveals itself to be bourgeois dictatorship, announced by a stomach-turning demonstration of their disregard for Life itself in Gaza. They are inaugurating a new period of their open domination with the screams of air-to-surface missiles, baptizing us all as powerless subjects in the blood of innocent Palestinians.

A few words, with the knowledge that the coming days will make my horrifying balance-sheet of the development of American fascism seem quite quaint, and awareness that we are rapidly flying headlong into a space beyond language’s expressive capacities: it is perhaps the most urgent task of the American left to insist that the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people concerns us all. It is not merely that the violence against the colonized disfigures the colonizer into something monstrous beyond recognition, not only that these necro-technologies will rapidly be deployed on our own streets against us, and it goes beyond the fact that passivity in the face of such violence hardens our hearts to the violence that comes next (the sweeps of our homeless neighbors, the increasing murder-ability of “criminals” and “migrants,” and the erasure of trans and queer people from social space). The history of the American left since the birth of this nation is the history of its failures. There have been two prime stumbling blocks no configuration has succeeded in clearing: the white chauvinism of our working classes and the nationalism of our socialist organizations. Robust solidarity with Palestine in the moment of its genocide would be an advanced expression of an American left at last shaking off the weight of dead generations; an internationalist attack on white supremacy, recognized not as an individual attitude but a globe-spanning technique of government; a long awaited rejection of the substitution of universal rights with exclusive privileges; and an urgently necessary reversal of the decades-long drift towards short-term economic interest and away from political consciousness.

The American proletariat is once again being tested. Its historical task is the seizure of political power, but the road to political power necessarily passes through the relinquishing of its exceptional privilege. What we have tracked in the paragraphs above is the violent, state and extra-state, repression and reversal of legitimate gains in the political consciousness of various fractions of the American working class. Such reversals at a time of persistent crisis ensure that when the ruling classes unite around fascist strategies of systemic renewal, the forces of resistance will be disoriented, disorganized, and desperately clinging to the very privileges that we must betray in order to fulfill our historical mission. We must begin only with total acceptance of our defeat. Paradoxically, such a defeat liberates us from the urgent temporality of crisis. We must resist the temptation to fling ourselves headlong into every project of survival and take seriously the fact that the reemergence of fascism in the United States is not a symptom of systemic strength, but of great weakness. We must allow ourselves to be fully convinced that far more important than our survival is that the barbarism of this world does not. Then, tactics and strategy can begin.

"False praxis is no praxis. Desperation that, because it finds the exits blocked, blindly leaps into praxis, with the purest of intentions joins forces with catastrophe." -Theodor W. Adorno "They have the clocks, but we have the time." Afghani proverb "When you're running out of time, you're not out of time." Kanye West Donda (2021)

(August 2024)

NOTES

[1] This is a dynamic that very closely mirrors that identified in Poulantzas’ 1974 study of historical fascism:

“The petty bourgeoisie is itself divided into class fractions… it is also possible for dislocations to appear between its different fractions. These dislocations can even be deep enough for one fraction to swing one way, the other in the opposite direction. Experience shows that a common political position is generally maintained in ‘normal’ conjunctures of class struggle, or in conjunctures of acute political crisis where the working class is on the defensive, as in the case of fascism. The dislocations appear above all in revolutionary conjunctures or in political crises corresponding to the working-class offensive, as in Germany and Italy between 1919 and 1921.” (p. 244)

The integrated fraction of the laboring classes, the capitalized, home-owning upper fraction of salaried employees breaks with the capitalist class and stands with the proletariat during the early phase of the revolutionary conjuncture. It does not stay this way:

“Before stabilization and during the first period of open crisis between the bourgeoisie and the working class, a large part of the petty bourgeoisie clearly swings over to the side of the working class… we can say that this is mainly the case with the salaried employees… After its open swing to the working class side, this part of the petty bourgeoisie seems to stick to social democracy during the stabilization step. Subsequently it becomes disillusioned with social democracy, which fails to defend its interests. Turning away from social democracy, the petty bourgeoisie as a whole finds itself faced, at the beginning of the rise of fascism, with that instability and lack of hegemony among the dominant classes and fractions which characterizes the bourgeois parties’ crisis of representation.” (p. 248)

While we have no social democracy in this country, the Black Lives Matter movement laid down the ideological foundations for a unified class acting for itself in a way hitherto unseen in this country, a movement capable of challenging and even abolishing property relations as we know it. As the stabilization of the fascist arrangement occurred with the defeat of the proletariat, in this case coinciding with the literal stabilization of the economy, the proletariat was abandoned by the now re-integrated middle classes.

[2] U.S. Current Trend: Bills Provide Immunity to Drivers Who Hit Protesters,

https://www.icnl.org/post/analysis/bills-provide-immunity-to-drivers-who-hit-protesters

[3] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1951/mm/ch01.htm

[4] https://www.chainlaw.com/why-are-u-s-roadways-getting-more-dangerous-while-other-countries-are-getting-safer/

[5] Muddy clothes? ‘Cop City’ activists question police evidence, AP, March 23, 2023

https://apnews.com/article/cop-city-protest-domestic-terrorism-atlanta-6d114e109d489d316f588f51c7cab0cc

[6] Some Assembly Democrats look to criminalize disruptive protests, February 21, 2024

https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2024/02/some-assembly-democrats-look-criminalize-disruptive-protests/394322/

[7] New York Governor considers face mask ban to deter crime https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/15/new-york-face-masks-ban-subway-crime#:~:text=New%20York%20has%20historically%20had,two%20years%20until%20September%202022.

[8] “Covid and the War in Ukraine,” IMF https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/ar/2022/in-focus/covid-19/

[9] There are many examples of these phenomena. A new unity of interest, and sometimes identity, between landed and digital capitals: Apple is now both a hardgoods producer and a streaming platform, Amazon is a platform, brick and mortar, logistics, a grocery store, and a pharmacy; and most recently Netflix has announced it is opening a chain of malls:

https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/netflix-house-entertainment-dining-shopping-complexes-cities-2025-1236040989/

[10] “Friendshoring set to lift prices” Financial Times https://www.ft.com/content/c7fa3fdb-195f-449f-b7b4-461c1e93b5d1

[11] “Child labor remains a key state legislative issue in 2024” Economic Policy Institute

https://www.epi.org/blog/child-labor-remains-a-key-state-legislative-issue-in-2024-state-lawmakers-must-seize-opportunities-to-strengthen-standards-resist-ongoing-attacks-on-child-labor-laws/#:~:text=Two%20states%E2%80%94Missouri%20and%20West,they%20are%20otherwise%20prohibited%20from

[12] “What’s behind the corporate effort to kneecap the National Labor Relations Board?” Economic Policy Institute

https://www.epi.org/blog/whats-behind-the-corporate-effort-to-kneecap-the-national-labor-relations-board-spacex-amazon-trader-joes-and-starbucks-are-trying-to-have-the-nlrb-declared-unconstitutional/

[13]  White House Reverses Obama Era Transgender Bathroom Policy https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/white-house-reverses-obama-era-transgender-bathroom-protections-n724426

[14] Tracking Abortion Bans Across the Country https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/us/abortion-laws-roe-v-wade.html

[15] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/17/jamie-dimon-praises-trump-warns-maga-criticism-could-hurt-biden.html

[16] https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2024/01/15/exp-blackrock-vice-chair-trump-iowa-caucuses-011503pseg2-cnni-business.cnn

[Hildebrand did not declare his preference for Trump as indicated in this statement. He called him the “wake up call that Europe needs” to regain sovereignty. Trump’s base of support comes overwhelmingly from the small business owner, not the large capitalist.]

[readingsquotes]

".... In the United States, the threat of a fascist movement’s electoral consolidation can serve to relegate the genocide in Palestine to a secondary consideration. ... how the Global North’s collusion with Israel’s war is grounded in a capitalist mentality that treats most of the world’s population as both threatening and disposable.

The effect of the first invocation of fascism is to delink the questions of climate, war and fascism; that of the second to view them as indissociable, not just in our analyses but in our politics. There is a bitter irony in granting primacy to the national fight against fascism over the campaign to stop a U.S.-funded genocide when the current Israeli government — in its exterminationist rhetoric, patronage of racist militias, colonizing drive and ultranationalism — fits textbook definitions of fascism far more neatly than any other contemporary regime.

Especially when it comes to the United States, the words of the great Marxist theorist of fascism, Nicos Poulantzas, still ring true: ​“He who does not wish to discuss imperialism … should stay silent on the subject of fascism.

Historical fascist movements and states arose as late-imperial powers, with aspirations to revive settler-colonialism in the age of mass industry and mass politics. After the downfall of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, critics of U.S. empire abroad and racism at home repeatedly invoked the specter of fascism. In his 1952 piece ​“Fascism in America,” economist Paul Baran (notably writing under a pseudonym to shield himself from McCarthyism), explained how a U.S. corporate-military coalition could carry out all the tasks of a fascist regime: securing through state power a mass basis for capitalist domination, while undermining any challenges from below, and only adopting fascism’s ​“classic forms” abroad. 

“As yet they need no storm troopers in the United States, slaughtering the wives and children of revolutionary workers and farmers,” Baran explained. ​“But they employ them where they are needed: in the towns and villages of Korea.”

...

If we believe that fascism is something that takes place only at the level of the nation-state, we might be persuaded that resisting fascism at home necessitates ignoring complicity with genocide abroad. But it is exactly this hopelessly cramped horizon being challenged in solidarity encampments worldwide.

...

If we wish to talk about American fascism, in the shadow of a U.S.-backed genocide carried out by a state where some leaders happily wear the fascist label, the least that we can do is learn from an internationalist, Black and Third-Worldist anti-fascism — one which has always insisted that fascism must be tackled on the scale of the world. The encampments and occupations that have risen up from Manhattan to Atlanta show what it means to confront colonial and imperial violence, to challenge its racist and eliminationist ideologies, by making explicit how that violence is reproduced in the institutions and cities where we work and live. 

A radical politics of divestment is reviving the traditions of internationalist anti-fascism. There is perhaps no clearer sign of this than the words spray-painted on the side of a tent in Rafah: ​“Thank you students in solidarity with Gaza, your message has reached.”

[captainobeatleration]

La monopolización permanente del saber por el Estado-sapiente-locutor, por sus aparatos y sus agentes, es lo que determina igualmente las funciones de organización y de dirección del Estado, funciones centralizadas en su separación específica de las masas: figura del trabajo intelectual (saber-poder) materializada en aparatos, frente al trabajo manual polarizado tendencialmente en unas masas populares separadas y excluidas de esas funciones organizativas.

Nicos Poulantzas en Estado, poder y socialismo. 1986. Siglo XXI.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Where there is a fairly regular alternation of two parties (the United States, Great Britain, West Germany), we can witness the creation of genuine inter-party networks: through intermingling of the forces, personnel and structures of the two dominant parties, there crystallizes a permanent web of circuits which, so to speak, functions as a single-party centre lodged in the central state apparatus. This centre goes far beyond mere personal relations among members of a single ‘power elite’, such as are invoked by certain perspicacious writers (most notably, Wright Mills) in order to explain the birth of this phenomenon. In fact, it is now anchored in the materiality of the dominant parties’ structures, which is itself articulated with the new materiality of the state apparatus. The single-party centre also serves to exercise genuine control over the administration. But it does so in relation to the Others: not only those who represent a genuine political alternative, but any other who escapes the centre’s control and thereby becomes for it a dangerous revolutionary. The single-party centre finds its identity only by establishing the other as an enemy.

Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism

[papierscolles]

Collage. Nicos Poulantzas. Texte. Lingerie.

[jangoxyarmeloxxeduardo68]

Entrevista a Nicos Poulantzas (1979) por Stuart Hall y Alan Hunt — Grupo de Investigación sobre Teorías del Estado UBA Esta entrevista fue publicada originalmente en Marxism Today en julio de 1979. Nicos Poulantzas fue una de las figuras más influyentes en la renovación del marxismo europeo.

[pyth1a]

“Capitalism keeps creating socialists, despite its best efforts. When people are dominated, they tend to resist: they build networks of mutual aid and find power in collective action. They begin to imagine a world organized along different lines, one where the wealth they make in common is held in common rather than hoarded by the few.

This is why you can’t kill socialism: because it’s not just a set of ideas about how to interpret and change the world but a tendency produced by the very system it seeks to replace. When Marx and Engels called communism a specter, they captured this undead quality. Socialism is the ghost in the machine, haunting capital wherever its circuits appear.”

[beguines]

Previous attempts to answer the question of how capitalism reproduces itself have tended to remain within the boundaries of what Nicos Poulantzas once called "the couplet violence-consent or repression-ideology". The (often implicit) assumption at work in this conceptual scheme is that there are two fundamental forms of power to which all exercise of power can be reduced: on the one hand, violence or the direct, physical coercion of the body, and, on the other hand, ideology or the formation of systems of representations, pictures, concepts, symbols and forms of thought that shape the ways in which people perceive social reality, including themselves. Alternative versions of this duality include coercion and consent, hard and soft power, dominance and hegemony, and repression and discourse. One of the clearest examples of this tendency to think of power in terms of such couplets can be found in Louis Althusser's analysis of the reproduction of capitalist relations of production. According to him, this reproduction "is ensured by the superstructure, by the legal-political superstructure and the ideological superstructure". Capitalism is, in other words, reproduced by the state-apparatuses, which are divided into two sets according to the form of power they primarily rely on: the repressive state-apparatuses (violence) and the ideological state-apparatuses (ideology).

The perhaps most fundamental claim of this thesis is that the couplet violence-ideology leaves an important form of power unexamined, namely what I will refer to as economic power. This form of power has its roots in the ability to re-organise the material conditions of social reproduction. By social reproduction, I mean the processes and activities involved in securing the continuous existence of a given society. Whereas violence and ideology directly address the subject, economic power addresses it only indirectly through the manipulation of its socio-material environment. Economic power thus has to do with the way in which social relations of domination reproduce themselves by being inscribed in the environment of the subject.

Another equally important claim of this thesis is that Marx's critique of political economy contains an indispensable basis for a theory of the economic power of capital, and that it is impossible to explain the paradoxical persistence of capitalism without such a theory. In a decisive passage in the first volume of Capital from which this thesis derives its title, Marx argues that once capitalism has been established,

"the mute compulsion of economic relations seals the domination of the capitalist over the worker [der stumme Zwang der ökonomischen Verhältnisse besiegelt die Herrschaft des Kapitalisten über den Arbeiter]. Extra-economic, immediate violence [Außerökonomische, unmittelbare Gewalt] is still of course used, but only in exceptional cases. In the ordinary run of things, the worker can be left to the “natural laws of production,” i.e., it is possible to rely on his dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of production themselves, and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them."

What Marx points to in this passage is that capitalism has a unique ability to reproduce itself by means of a form of impersonal, anonymous and abstract power embedded in the economic processes themselves. The social relations of domination involved in the economy is thus not sustained only by processes "external" to the economy, as in Althusser's theory where the reproduction of the property relations in the economic "base" occurs "outside" of this base. The characteristic thing about the power of capital is precisely that it has an ability to reproduce itself through economic processes, or, put differently, that the organisation of social reproduction on the basis of capital gives rise to a set of powerful structural mechanisms which ensure its reproduction all by itself, as it were. Here, we see the significance of the distinction between the original creation of capitalist relations of production and their reproduction. Marx's claim is that, while the historical creation of capitalism was premised on massive amounts of violence, the reproduction of those relations also—though not exclusively—relies on the "mute compulsion of economic relations", or what I referred to as economic power.

Søren Mau, Mute Compulsion: A Theory of the Economic Power of Capital

[sherbetlemonsandshuriken]

2021 Reading

It is September 2021, and these are all the books that I've read in 2021 so far. My aim was to read 30 new books; between being unemployed for nearly four months, and then getting a decent salary increase in my new job, I've currently read 57 new books, plus about fifteen re-reads. (Oops).

1. Alt-Right: From 4-chan to the White House - Mike Wendling

2. Bullshit Jobs: The Rise of Pointless Work and What We Can Do About It - David Graeber

3. Can the Left Learn To Meme?: Adorno, Video Gaming and Stranger Things - Mike Watson

4. The Dispossessed - Ursula K. Le Guin

5. Seven Devils - Laura Lam and Elizabeth May

6. We Are Bellingcat: An Intelligence Agency for the People - Eliot Higgins

7. The Way of Kings - Brandon Sanderson (pt.2)

8. Invitation to a Bonfire - Adrienne Celt

9. King of Scars - Leigh Bardugo

10. Words of Radiance - Brandon Sanderson (pt.1 & 2)

12. The New Authoritarianism - Salvatore Babones

13. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right - Angela Nagle

14. How Democracies Die - Daniel Ziblatt & Steven Levitsky

15. In Search of Kazakhstan: The Land That Disappeared - Christopher Robbins

16. After The Fact: The Truth About Fake News - Marcus Gilroy-Ware

17. Six of Crows - Leigh Bardugo

18. Once Upon A River - Diane Setterfield

19. The Far Right Today - Cas Mudde

20. Foucault's Pendulum - Umberto Eco

21. A Revolution Undone: Egypt's Road Beyond Revolt - H.A. Hellyer

22. Our Women on the Ground - Zahra Hankir

23. She Said - Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey

24. We Need New Stories - Nesrine Malik

25. Celestial Bodies - Jokha Alharthi

26. Crooked Kingdom - Leigh Bardugo

27. Lore - Alexandra Bracken

28. Shadow and Bone - Leigh Bardugo

29. Siege and Storm - Leigh Bardugo

30. Ruin and Rising - Leigh Bardugo

31. Angloarabia: Why Gulf Wealth Matters to Britain - David Wearing

32. Propaganda Blitz - David Edwards and David Cromwell

33. Why Nations Fail - Daron Acemoglu

34. Rule of Wolves - Leigh Bardugo

35. We Hunt The Flame - Hafsah Faizal

36. This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends - Nicole Perlroth

37. Culture Warlords - Talia Lavin

38. Fascism and Dictatorship - Nicos Poulantzas

39. Oathbringer - Brandon Sanderson (pt. 1 & 2)

41. Merchants of Hate - Jack Jardel

42. Vox - Christina Dalcher

43. Lean Out - Dawn Foster

44. Hamnet - Maggie O'Farrell

45. Strange Hate - Keith Kahn-Harris

46. The Fifth Season - N.K. Jemsin

47. The Obelisk Gate - N.K. Jemsin

48. The Doctor Who Fooled The World - Brian Deer

49. Drums in the Distance - Joe Mulhall

50. The Stone Sky - N.K. Jemsin

51. Algorithms of Oppression - Safiya Umoja Noble

52. The Priory of the Orange Tree - Samantha Shannon

53. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism - Shoshanna Zuboff

54. The Cruel Prince - Holly Black

55. The Wrath and the Dawn - Renee Ahdieh

56. The Ballard of Songbirds and Snakes - Suzanne Collins

57. The Three-Body Problem - Liu Cixin