The practical results of four decades of anti-capitalist scribblings
COMMUNIZATION:
“Communization […] has little positive advice to give us about particular, immediate practice in the here and now […] What advice it can give is primarily negative: the social forms implicated in the reproduction of the capitalist class relation will not be instruments of the revolution, since they are part of that which is to be abolished.” Endnotes
OPEN MARXISM:
“How then do we change the world without taking power? At the end of the book, as at the beginning, we do not know. The Leninists know, or used to know. We do not. Revolutionary change is more desperately urgent than ever, but we do not know any more what revolution means. Asked, we tend to cough and splutter and try to change the subject. In part, our not-knowing is the not-knowing of those who are historically lost: the knowing of the revolutionaries of the last century has been defeated.” John Holloway
WERTKRITIK:
“The call for the abolition of labor does not have immediate ramifications for Marxist politics.
There is no new program or a master plan for emancipation that can be developed out of the abolition of value. Rather, it can be seen as a condition of emancipation from value and the abstract system of oppression it represents.” Elmar Flatschart
LEFT ACCELERATIONISM:
“Perhaps the real import of the accelerationism defended by Srnicek and Williams is as an intervention into the politics of abstraction. They argue that the representation of abstraction is not only unavoidable but necessary in order to mount an epistemic and political challenge to capitalism. But the fact that such representation is necessary does not guarantee that it is possible to align epistemic and political acceleration, or more basically, that it will be possible to align theoretical explanation with emancipatory activity. Doing so requires the social realisation of cognition […]. Without a theory of the totality that articulates explanatory rationality with emancipatory causality, it becomes difficult to understand the conditions under which epistemic practices might be realised. This is arguably accelerationism’s chief lacuna. What is required is an account of the link between the conceptual and the social at the level of practice, which is to say, an account of the way in which cognitive function supervenes on social practices. This is what … [Left] accelerationism [does not] currently provide.” Ray Brassier
Any objective observer will realize that the last four decades of theoretical development has been a dead end. Theory provides no more practical advice today than it did at the end of the 1970s.
Wage labor must be abolished. Right now. Immediately. Without hesitation on our part.
This is the conclusion everyone is trying to avoid.