“To destitute is not primarily to attack the institution, but to attack the need we have of it.” This statement, from the Invisible Committee’s text Now (2016), is at the heart of an essay by Spencer Beswick that we share below.
Reflecting on what he calls “living communism”, and working through the Invisible Committee’s reading of the german Autonomen of the 1980s as a revolutionary experiment in creating an “archipelago of communes”, a question does arise, however, from Beswick’s own conclusion, as we consider this experience, and other more recent experiences: if the Autonomen failed in creating sufficiently robust autonomous spaces, robust enough that is to keep the state’s policing forces at bay (and one could say the same of the current examples that he cites, for instance, the French ZADs), is it correct to see such spaces as instruments of resistance, of conflict, of war, against capitalism? The question may seem misplaced, but what it points to is an important distinction that can be made between being ungovernable and non-governable.
If cooperatives can be criticised for ultimately compromising with capitalist social relations, so too may squats and/or ZADS lose their “revolutionary” lustre (and we have examples of such throughout Europe and elsewhere). “Before the ungovernable, revolts, protests, civil disobedience, a government can respond in one of two ways. It may negotiate and perhaps consent to a change in politics. Or it may repress. In this sense, the ungovernable is what can be either understood or dominated.” The non-governable can, on the other hand, only be dominated, and not governed. As to what in practice distinguishes the two is not a given. “There is no clear frontier between disobedience and what is foreign to obedience.” The distinction is a moving and fragile one, for the non-governable exists only at the limit of the ungovernable. (Catherine Malabou, Au Voleur! Anarchisme et philosophie, 52-3) But that being so, it is equally very difficult, if not impossible, to identify movements and/or political practices that in fact block, secede from and destitute capitalist social relations.
What we do know, and this from experience, is the enormous importance that such “autonomous” spaces or communes can have in transmitting the “tradition of the oppressed”, of securing a minimal infrastructure for the reproduction of potentially anti-capitalist social relations, and of serving as fundamental points of passage in moments of (always unplanned) insurrection. They are, or at least can be, with no guarantee of permanence, means by which to transform our needs (we are tempted to say, spaces for the education of our desires) and thus, examples of destituent politics.
Destituent modes of life, however, are not the same as what Beswick calls, following the Invisible Committee, “bases of liberated territory from which to attack the state and capitalism”. As it is not clear to what extent we are dealing with “liberated” territory, so it is unclear what is to be attacked. If there is no more Bastille or Winter Palace to storm, are the targets so obvious? And if not, to strike out blindly at the enemy is politically ridiculous, if not simply mad. The repertoires of “violent” protest or insurrection may be exhausted, but are continually replayed because of motives that have little to do with any “revolution”.
This is not say that everything will move along peacefully, or that “self-defence” is to be excluded, but that it is impossible to predict or to plan for a general class war, whatever that may mean.
We may close with a sentence from Deleuze that Beswick also quotes: “Escape, but while escaping look for a weapon.”
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For Albert Woodfox (1947-2022)
In my forties, I chose to take my pain and turn it into compassion, and not hate. Whenever I experienced pain of any origin I always made a promise to myself never to do anything that would cause someone else to suffer the pain I was feeling in that moment. I still had moments of bitterness and anger. But by then I had the wisdom to know that bitterness and anger are destructive. I was dedicated to building things, not tearing them down.
Albert Woodfox, Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Confinement
Despite the important of antiracist social movements over the last half century, racism hides from view within institutional structures, and its most reliable refuge is the prison system.
Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?
There is a power in the words of Albert Woodfox, when he speaks of his 44 years of solitary confinement at the Angola State Penitentiary of Louisiana, a power that is borne by the simplicity of his words, of a witness who presents not the facts as a third party to an event, but as someone who lived it, who is the event in the flesh. His every word, in his every thoughtful hesitation, his every gesture, speaks of his memories and of his faith that what he experienced need not be repeated. He requires no grand eloquence or baroque extravagance to speak, for his subject is injustice, the injustice of a criminal system that can falsely accuse a man of a crime because of his racial identity and political commitments, and condemn him to physical isolation for almost half a century.
Albert Woodfox’s crime was to have been an african american and a member of the Black Panther Party, and together with Robert King and Herman Wallace, they would become known as the “Angola 3”, and again, together, they would spend over 100 years in solitary.
On his release from prison in 2016, Woodfox dedicated himself to “standing as a witness”, to giving voice to those with whom he shared the nightmare of solitary confinement, and to those who still suffer it. (Robert King would do the same, while Herman Wallace died three days after his release from prison, in 2013).
Albert Woodfox died this last August 4th. In memory of this “elder”, we share below an interview with him for Scalawag Magazine (19/08/2019) and a video recorded interview at the Public Library of Toronto (02/04/2019). And we close with a documentary, Angola 3: Black Panthers and the Last Slave Plantation of 2006.
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