“All reasoning about the future is criminal, because it prevents pure destruction, and interferes with the progress of revolution.”
Souvarine, from Émile Zola’s Germinal
In the wake of France’s July riots, an essay/reflection by Erwan Sommerer, inspired by a work by Nicola Massimo De Feo. (lundimatin #391, 11/07/2023)
Published in 2020 by Divergences, Contre la révolution politique [Against Political Revolution][1] by Nicola Massimo De Feo is a decisive book that brings together Italian workerism and Russian anarchism of the late 1860s. De Feo’s thesis is that the pamphlets resulting from the ephemeral collaboration between Bakunin and Nechayev, in particular the Revolutionary Catechism, deserve to be brought back to the forefront of anti-capitalist reflection after a long period of discredit: the primitive and brutal anarchism that we discover there, far from being the mark of a bygone era, on the contrary illuminates the contemporary conditions of revolutionary struggle and autonomy in a context of increased social disintegration, alienation and dehumanisation.
I would like to show here that this theoretical analysis finds an echo in the current riots. The aim is not to lay down an overarching or anachronistic exegetic grid on these revolts, nor to speak in the place of those who participate in them, but to propose some avenues for interpretation.
… power is not defined only by its capacity to be obeyed but, first of all, by its capacity to give orders and commandments, even if those orders are not totally obeyed. A power does not fall when it is no more obeyed or completely obeyed, but when it ceases to give orders.
Giorgio Agamben, Che cos’è il commando?/What is a commandment?
“The lesson I draw is order, order, order. Our country needs a return of authority at every level, and firstly in the family.” – French President Emmanuel Macron speaking in an a television interview, on July 24th, 2023 (Politico 24/07/2023)
“Knowing that he is in prison is stopping me from sleeping … In general, I believe that ahead of a possible trial, a police officer should not be in prison, even if he may have committed serious faults or errors in the course of his work.” – France’s national police chief Frederic Veaux in an interview for the newspaper Le Parisien, 23rd of July, 2023
The two statements, the second, from France’s police chief and the first, from the country’s President, coincide perfectly to reveal the nature of political power: to command, without justification, for the sake of commanding, or, inversely, the justification for commanding is to command.
Reflections on the French police murder of Nahel Merzoukand the country’s July riots, by Rodrigo Karmy Bolton. (Lobo Suelto! 11/07/2023)
What does it mean when France burns under barricades? Perhaps, that not only France but also the Republic, as a modern model of the political, is in ashes. Towards the end of the 18th century, the philosopher Immanuel Kant described the event of the French Revolution that had burst onto the threshold of history as follows: “”The revolution of a people full of spirit, which we have seen carried out in our days, may be successful or fail, then, perhaps, to be so full of miseries and cruelties, that a right-thinking man, who could hope to start it a second time, would not decide to undertake an experiment of such costs: such a revolution, I say nevertheless, finds in the the spirits of all the spectators – who are not themselves involved in the game – such a participation in desire, that it borders on enthusiasm even if its expression is dangerous; such, in short, that it can have no other cause than a moral disposition of the human race.” The revolution can bring infinite costs, spread blood throughout history, but in the “cheers of the spectators,” it finds the crucial “enthusiasm” for which, despite the danger it entails, “participation in desire” shows that its “cause” is nothing other than the “moral disposition of the human race”. The French Revolution brings with it hope in the midst of humanity traversed by despotisms. Spectators can watch a game that borders on enthusiasm to the extent that the modern notion of progress stands out in it. In the French Revolution, it allows us to contemplate precisely that it will be the “human race” that “progresses towards the better”. Although there are setbacks, the Revolution marks a before and an after in the story of human moralisation.
If in Kant the Revolution marks the era of moral progress, the contemporary riots that have set the streets of Paris on fire mark the debacle of that idea, the end of modernity as the era of progress. They are the denunciation that progress has been nothing more than a single catastrophe, as Walter Benjamin was able to indicate in the lucid fragments dedicated the concept of History. Progress was nothing more than the design of destruction, the total mobilisation by which the oligarchies that dominate the planet share out the spoils of humanity. The France of Kant, which offered a horizon of progress, is no longer our France: the modern utopia has been entangled in the paralysis of devastation.
Reflections on the French police murder of Nahel Merzoukand the country’s July riots, by Santiago López Petit. (Lobo Suelto! 11/07/2023)
Nahel’s mother, surrounded by her son’s friends, makes a motorcycle engine roar. Her son, murdered by a police officer, liked to ride a motorcycle a lot. The noise reminds her of Nahel. Last night, Jean-Yves Sioubalak together with other parents spent the night in the school to protect it, and when a group of young people approached them they were told: “You must not burn the school. The school is the future”. I can only imagine that the shadows cracked up in laughter. They are two scenes from the theatre of truth that has been represented in a banlieue in France. These scenes can also be accompanied by some text. For example, the tweet from the French police union: “We congratulate the colleagues who opened fire on a 17-year-old delinquent. By neutralizing his vehicle, they protected his life and that of other road users”.
People attend a march in tribute to Nahel, a 17-year-old teenager killed by a French police officer during a traffic stop, in Nanterre, Paris suburb, France, June 29, 2023. The slogan reads “Justice for Nahel”. REUTERS/Sarah Meyssonnier
With rebellion, awareness is born.
Albert Camus, The Rebel
Constitutively out of step with the present, the revolt is an impatient epiphany of the future that comes after tomorrow.
Donatella Di Cesare, The Time of Revolt
French politicians – the president, Emmanuel Macron, included – have taken to inebriating themselves with the language of the extreme right to describe dissidence from and protest against government policies. In particular, elements of the country’s population have come to be increasingly described, in the “mainstream news media”, as undergoing a process of ensauvagement [of becoming savage], or, of what amounts to the other side of the same apocalyptic register, of décivilisation [of becoming uncivilised].
The following text was sent to us by French comrades on the third day of unrest following the murder of the teenager Nahel Merzouk by French police in the city of Nanterre, a suburb of Paris. It provides an analysis of the situation and an overview of the fight against police brutality in France starting in the 1970s.
Uri Gordon’s recently published essay on Fredy Perlman’s anarchist social theory “Leviathan’s Body” serves as an inspiration to return to Perlman’s writings.
Perlman’s starting point, which informs his entire body of work, is a critique of alienation as practice. Initially drawn from Marx via Isaak Illich Rubin, and later influenced by the Situationists and possibly Lefebvre, the key to this critique is the concept of fetishism, which stands for the inverted domination of social forms of alienated power over the individuals who reproduce them. Influenced by his activist experiences and by the anarchist histories he read and translated, and taking further selective cues from C. Wright Mills and possibly from Kropotkin, Perlman’s breakthrough is to generalise this account of fetishism to include but exceed productive relations. Thus, he explicitly sets the state in analytical parity with capital, theorising authority as a fetish distinct from exchange value. Implicitly, he points to various other containers for alienated human powers, including the family, religion and scholarship. In further identifying direct action with the reclamation of alienated powers, Perlman adds sociological coherence to the anarchist case against representation and for collective autonomy in social struggles.
Isaak Illich Rubin’s tragic life would be outlived by his essay of 1927, Abstract Labour and Value in Marx’s System; a fundamental work that would contribute to the emergence of value-form theory, and more recently value criticism theory, withing the Marxist theoretical tradition. For Perlman, the encounter with Rubin’s work would allow him to develop a global understanding of capitalism rooted in a reading of Marx that bound his early theory of alienation with his later concepts of reification, the fetishism of commodities, abstract labour and value. Without here plunging into the details of this reading – summarised in the text below that served as an introduction to the first English language translation of Rubin’s essay -, Perlman would come to share the conception of capitalism as a historical social system that moulded social relations and social “identities” according to the needs of commodity production (and these include goods, labour and money). The critique of capitalism cannot therefore limit itself to questions of economic distribution and political liberalism – however significant these may be -, but must extend to a criticism of labour, money, the commodity form and of the social relations that render these possible (which potentially extends beyond the factory floor and the sphere of labour as typically understood).
Rubin points out that the form which labor takes in capitalist society is the form of value: “The reification of labor in value is the most important conclusion of the theory of fetishism, which explains the inevitability of ‘reification’ of production relations among people in a commodity economy” (Rubin, p.72). Thus the theory of value is about the regulation of labor; it is this fact that most critics of the theory failed to grasp.
The question Marx raises is how the working activity of people is regulated in capitalist society. His theory of value is offered as an answer to this question. It will be shown that most critics do not offer a different answer to the question Marx raises, they object to the question. In other words, economists do not say that Marx gives erroneous answers to the question he raises, but that he gives erroneous answers to the questions they raise:
Marx asks: How is human working activity regulated in a capitalist economy?
Marx answers: Human working activity is alienated by one class, appropriated by another class, congealed in commodities, and sold on a market in the form of value.
The economists answer: Marx is wrong. Market price is not determined by labor; it is determined by the price of production and by demand. “The great Alfred Marshall” insisted that “market price — that is, economic value — was determined by both supply and demand, which interact with one another in much the same way as Adam Smith described the operation of competitive markets.”[63]
Marx was perfectly aware of the role of supply and demand in determining market price, as will be shown below. The point is that Marx did not ask what determines market price; he asked how working activity is regulated.
This Marxist source would be of considerable importance for Perlman’s own thought, as would be quickly revealed in his reading of the May 68 events in France (Worker-Student Action Committees. France May ’68). But it would perhaps also show its limits, limits that can be summarised in the ideas of a historicism of labour (the framing of human experience-thought by capitalist commodity production) and of emancipation as reappropriation or disalienation of human creative power (the conscious and self-conscious autonomy of creation). This however will be for a future post.
Statement from France’s Union communiste libertaire, 28th of June, 2023 …
On the night of June 27 to 28, revolts began in the city of Nanterre to denounce a new murder by a policeman.
His name was Nahel, he was 17 years old. Nahel died on June 27, 2023 in his car: he was shot and killed, at close range, by a police officer following a refusal to comply. He was on a bus lane and tried to flee after being threatened with death by the policeman who was already pointing his gun at him.
Fredy Perlman’s anarchist maximalism had a formative influence on the movement’s post-1960s revival, quite apart from his later and better-known critiques of domestication. Perlman’s longneglected books, pamphlets and parodies from 1968–1972 show him championing an antivanguardist ethos of direct action and practical de-alienation, while working towards an original and distinctly anarchist social theory of domination. This article traces the influences of Isaak Rubin, C. Wright Mills, and possibly Henri Lefebvre and Peter Kropotkin, on Perlman’s thought. Perlman’s originality was to generalise a heterodox Marxian critique of social reproduction, including but exceeding productive relations. Thus, he explicitly sets the state in analytical parity with capital, theorising authority as a fetish distinct from exchange value. Implicitly, he points to other containers for alienated powers, including the family, religion and scholarship. Perlman’s account of self- and community powers remains incomplete, however, eliding constitutive violence and inviting engagement with current intersectional approaches.
What does “the reactionary wave” mean globally and here in Spain? How to understand this complex and multifaceted phenomenon, in order to better combat it?
I propose this interpretation: the reactionary wave is trying to prop up a world in crisis, a model that is taking in water everywhere.
The riot against State-forms: An anarcho-workerist hypothesis
“All reasoning about the future is criminal, because it prevents pure destruction, and interferes with the progress of revolution.”
Souvarine, from Émile Zola’s Germinal
In the wake of France’s July riots, an essay/reflection by Erwan Sommerer, inspired by a work by Nicola Massimo De Feo. (lundimatin #391, 11/07/2023)
Published in 2020 by Divergences, Contre la révolution politique [Against Political Revolution][1] by Nicola Massimo De Feo is a decisive book that brings together Italian workerism and Russian anarchism of the late 1860s. De Feo’s thesis is that the pamphlets resulting from the ephemeral collaboration between Bakunin and Nechayev, in particular the Revolutionary Catechism, deserve to be brought back to the forefront of anti-capitalist reflection after a long period of discredit: the primitive and brutal anarchism that we discover there, far from being the mark of a bygone era, on the contrary illuminates the contemporary conditions of revolutionary struggle and autonomy in a context of increased social disintegration, alienation and dehumanisation.
I would like to show here that this theoretical analysis finds an echo in the current riots. The aim is not to lay down an overarching or anachronistic exegetic grid on these revolts, nor to speak in the place of those who participate in them, but to propose some avenues for interpretation.
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