I was a communist throughout.
Justly though, the other communists
looked askance at me. I was a communist
despite their certainties, despite my doubts.
Justly they did not see themselves in me.
They would not admit my discipline.
My centralism seemed anarchy to them.
My self-criticisms contradicted theirs.
Special communists cannot be:
to think so is not to be so.
Justly they did not see themselves in me,
my comrades. Like them, I too
was enslaved. Even more so: I tended to forget it.
They did their work, I followed my inclination.
Exactly that: I was a communist throughout.
Despite their certainties, despite my doubts
I always wanted this world ended.
Myself ended too. And it was that exactly
which estranged us. My hopes had no point for them.
My centralism seemed anarchy to them.
As if I wanted more, more truth,
more for me to give them, more
for them to give me. Thus living, dying thus.
I was a communist throughout.
I always wanted this world ended.
I have survived enough to see
comrades who bruised me broken by intolerable truths.
Now tell me: you knew very well I was with you?
Was that why you hated me? My truth is truly needed,
breathed in through space and time, heard patiently.
Franco Fortini, Communism (1958)
Remembering/celebrating Toni Negri, with Alberto Toscano (Side Car/New Left Review, 21/12/2023) …
‘The free person thinks least of all of death, and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life.’ Toni Negri, who died in Paris at the age of 90 on 16 December, turned this dictum of Spinoza into an ethical and political lodestar. The conclusion of the third and final instalment of his intellectual autobiography, Storia di un comunista, features a moving reflection on aging as a rejoicing in life and a paring down of action. Negri offers the overcoming of death – a resolutely atheist and collective idea of eternity – as the substance of his thought, politics, and life. He writes: ‘And yet the possibility of overcoming the presence of death is not a dream of youth, but a practice of old age; always keeping in mind that organising life to overcome the presence of death is a duty of humanity, a duty as important as that of eliminating the exploitation and disease that are death’s cause.’
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Catherine Malabou: Being an Anarchist
From Ill Will (23/12/2023) …
The government of man by man (under whatever name it be disguised) is oppression. Society finds its highest perfection in the union of order with anarchy.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property? (1840)
The question I have raised is the following: if the anarchist problem since Proudhon is precisely to think about politics without the aid of hegemony, in any form whatsoever, it is also now a question of doing so when a certain anarchism has itself become hegemonic.
Catherine Malabou
“Being an Anarchist” is the concluding chapter of Catherine Malabou’s Stop Thief! Anarchism and Philosophy, now available in English. In it, the French philosopher argues that a “reckoning” is needed between philosophy and anarchism. Interrogating the gap between the conceptual embrace of the “anarchic” and the pompous disregard for historically-existent anarchism, Malabou seeks to redress an “anarchist failure of philosophical concepts of anarchism.” While thinkers such as Schürmann, Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Agamben, and Rancière all elaborate concepts of anarchy, the anarchic, and the ungovernable, they also insist on the irreducibility of their concepts to political anarchism, distancing themselves from it while mining it for resources. By exploring the peculiar disposition that leads philosophers at once to plunder and disavow anarchism, Malabou’s broader aim is to disentangle the anarchic currents of our present, which assume both subversive and oppressive forms. While polarizations such as the Yellow Vests, the ZAD, or the decentralized movement to Defend the Atlanta Forest attest to new forms of mass organization and decision-making based on “self-generated, collective care for an environment, a territory,” these subversive currents are emerging alongside what Malabou terms an “anarchist turn in capitalism itself,” a shift from neoliberalism to “ultraliberalism.” How, she asks, “can the horizontality of alternative formations be distinguished from the veinstone of anarcho-capitalism?” For this, a clarification of the philosophical stakes of both anarchy and anarchism today is necessary.
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