A precondition for reestablishing the perspective of action is to make a final and clear break with all “politics” in the institutional sense. Today, the only possible form of “politics” is radical separation from the world of politics and its institutions, of representation and delegation, in order to invent and replace it with new forms of direct intervention.
Anselm Jappe
Anselm Jappe continues in the theoretical work of the Krisis Group and in the essay that we share below, draws out the political consequences of the critique of capitalist abstract labour and commodity production. (Published at libcom.org).
Anselm Jappe rejects the traditional concept of politics and proposes a post-political politics appropriate for the crisis conditions of our time, a politics whose task is to “at least preserve the possibility for future emancipation against the dehumanization imposed by the commodity” and is based on a combination of non-representational direct action, the rehabilitation of the idea of sabotage, and anti-capitalist theory that transcends the fixed boundary between praxis and theory, without succumbing to the temptation to seek immediate results by yielding to traditional political attitudes and methods.
Against labour, against capital … play!
In the domain of our life excess manifests in itself in so far as violence wins over reason. Work demands the sort of conduct where effort is in a constant ration with productive efficiency. It demands rational behaviour where the wild impulses worked out on feast days and usually in games are frowned upon. If we were unable to repress these impulses we should not be able to work, but work introduces the very reason for repressing them. These impulses confer an immediate satisfaction on those who yield to them. Work, on the other hand, promises to those who overcome them a reward late on whose value cannot be disputed except from the point of view of the present moment. From the earliest times work has produced a relaxation of tension thanks to which men cease to respond to the immediate urge impelled by the violence of desire. No doubt it is arbitrary always to construct the detachment fundamental to work with tumultuous urges whose necessity is not constant. Once began, however, work does make it impossible to respond to these immediate solicitations which could make us indifferent to the promised desirable results. Most of the time, work is the concern of men acting collectively and during the time reserved for work the collective has to oppose those contagious impulses to excess in which nothing is left but the immediate surrender to excess, to violence, that is. Hence the human collective, partly dedicated to work, is defined by taboos without which it would not have become the world of work that it essentially is.
Georges Bataille, Erotism.
The critique of labour is not limited to marxist inspired theorising. If the Krisis Group has developed a conceptually sophisticated analysis of the oppression of abstract labour and commodity production, anarchist writers, if not uniformly and with one voice, have also not been sparing in their condemnation work. The conceptual framework varies though, opening up other possibilities of understanding and of radical anti-capitalist politics. There are tensions between these two traditions (to state matters very simply, the Krisis Group place abstract labour-commodity production at the centre of their analysis of capitalist society, with all contemporary social relations being read off this centre, while anarchists – and other critical theorists – have tended to understand commodity production as dependent on other “non-economic” relations of social reproduction) and within anarchism itself. But there are also commonalities.
We then begin, from within anarchism, with Bob Black’s the Abolition of Work, originally published in 1985, and revised in 1991. (From Bob Black’s website Inspiracy).
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