Cliff Rowe, The Struggle Between the Unemployed and the Police Forces, oil on canvas, 1932–33. Collection of Borys Voznytskyi, Lviv National Art Gallery, Ukraine.
Continued from Part 1
M. E. O’Brien (MEO): There’s a thesis of the workers’ movement in communization literature. Debates aside, broadly the idea is that from the 1890s to the 1970s, there was a common horizon of how to think about socialism that was widely shared by huge numbers of working-class people in the capitalist world. Although many of them thought of themselves as inspired by Marx, it was quite different from Marx’s vision of the abolition of class society.
For these millions of people, it was a vision for which the experience of collective working-class interdependence in industrial manufacturing provided an intuitive blueprint for how to think about postcapitalist society, whether communist or socialist or anarchist. That vision was a generalization of the conditions of the working class, not their abolition. In this shared vision, programs really spoke to people because they had some broad link to the experiences of industrial production, and they could see how society could be rationally organized that way. Intuitively they could see it. No matter what political disagreements they had, they could see in their minds how a program could lead from the conditions we’re at now and the struggles we’re doing now all the way to a revolution and all the way to a free society. That vision was graspable by hundreds of millions of people intuitively. It really spoke to people.
And then something about the changing dynamics of capital accumulation since the 1970s and the changing dynamics of class formation broke that. The argument goes that we no longer have any intuitive grasp of what links the present to a revolutionary future. People come along and propose various revolutionary ideas, but they’re not seen as plausible. We hear them and we’re like, “Yeah, that’s not going to work.” Someone in your political group might talk about this or that, and that’s fine. But the moment someone starts speaking with confidence about it, it only resonates with a very small number of people. That’s a phenomenon not just because of “bad ideas” of postmodernism or anarchism, and not just because of cultural change, but because something has changed in the structure of class formation itself. I do think there is a revolutionary path to communism. I do think we will find it. Our entire survival as a species and the survival of this planet depends on that. But I don’t think we’ve found it yet. It will take multiple future mass cycles of struggle in order for that to emerge on a level that really speaks to people. It might draw from some obscure political ideology or platform or program that currently exists, but it will not come about because somebody comes up with a good idea and manages to sell it to people. It will come about because of the material dynamics of the class struggle itself.
Jasper Bernes (JB): I believe that the theory that I do, communist theory, is a reflection of practice. All of the ideas I put forward in this book are not mine and they’re not new. They are in some sense present in the struggles of workers and proletarians over the last hundred and fifty years. I’m just synthesizing ideas that have already animated thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or millions of people. Right now, those ideas don’t capture people at that scale. What matters is that those ideas become common sense. That’s what would be most exciting for me.
I’m still going to participate and struggle in my own way, but I do think that there’s an on-off switch that gets flipped when you’re ready to give everything for it. For me to be ready to give everything, I would want to see those ideas become common sense, because you don’t want to make that decision and be wrong. So the work is participating in movements and trying to amplify them and broadcast the ideas that come out of them. I don’t have the answers, but I do think that millions of people struggling do. The most important thing I can do is pay attention to what other people are doing and to other class struggles that are happening, because that’s where new ideas and tactics are going to come from. The most important work that communists can do is critically amplify struggles. I’m going to keep doing that, and once it reaches a certain pitch, then it’ll be go time.
Audience question 1: Jasper, I love your description of abolitionist councils in the final chapter and the process of doing material inquiry into the technical means for reproduction. I think we can see a couple of embryonic forms of this in New York City right now. One is the spread of ICE rapid-response networks that are actively observing and processing information and then disseminating it. The other is the more voluntaristic mobilization of Mamdani canvassers. If we assume that these are embryonic forms, I’m curious what the first steps would be to pivot or detourn them into doing the process of material inquiry, either to escalate the struggles against ICE right now or to take questions of material and social reproduction seriously.
Audience question 2: Thanks for these talks. I’d like to propose a topic rather than a question: the cultivation of and distribution of food. How should we think about food cultivation in the context of a revolutionary process?
Audience question 3: I’m happy that Kristin Ross’s book about Rimbaud was mentioned. My question concerns the role of poetry or literature broadly speaking in any potential unrest or revolution going forward, particularly with the rise of LLMs, AI, and so on.
JB: In the last chapter of the book I detail the history of what’s been called “workers’ inquiry,” which comes out of the council communist revival that happened after World War II. It started with C. L. R. James’s Correspondence Group; even though they didn’t use the term “inquiry” or “workers’ inquiry,” they ended up inspiring other groups to do similar projects. This became a vital practice of trying to figure out what workers know, what they experience, how they understand themselves as actors.
I want to expand the notion of inquiry to include what I would call “struggle inquiry.” To answer the question about ICE, I think there are two types of struggle inquiry. There’s a postmortem struggle inquiry—for example, an inquiry into the nature of the George Floyd uprising: what happened and what could have happened. The other type is inquiry into ongoing movements, which tries to figure out where they are limited by a lack of information. I think it’s obvious that movements right now are limited by a lack of information. There are real questions about how to collect that information and distribute it with regard to legality. I think the imperative is to really figure out what needs to be known and to work with people to develop that knowledge. Inquiry is always happening in organizing. There’s almost no organizing that doesn’t involve some process of inquiry, but I think we can be more systematic about it and figure out the information that needs to be shared.
I get this idea of transparency and the simplification of knowledge from the council-communist tradition. Council communism insists that the process of doing common production for common need will require simplifying things because they’re needlessly complex, and because ideally we want anybody to be able to participate in any process. It’s a question not just of gathering information but of how to process and make it available for people so they can act on it. This comes down to software and publishing and design; these kinds of questions are separate from the question of how we get this information.
The food question is really important. For thinking about a technical material inquiry into the nature of capitalist reproduction, food is a great place to start. In some sense we have to start from a particular place. You have to investigate one area as it interfaces with the total global capitalist system. One way to start is to get together with a group of people and think about all the food you consume and then track it and figure out where it comes from. You’ll need to find out where the warehouses are that we need to take over. You’ll need to find out where the stuff is. You may also find out how little of it there is, and how in a revolutionary situation it’s going to be a real problem that there’s not enough food. Maybe in certain places, like in California, we’ll find out that we have a ton of food, whereas in other places we may discover that we don’t have enough. The same goes for water and energy and every other kind of vital infrastructural system.
MEO: I’ll address the ICE question. Broadly speaking there is an effort to consolidate a fascist state in the United States right now. Whether they’re going to be successful or not is yet to be seen. They control the executive apparatus, but the level of contradictions within the state and within the ruling class are very, very high, and they certainly haven’t consolidated any kind of stable regime that’s reproducible in the long term.
I think direct street-based confrontation with ICE—disrupting what they’re doing in a mass way—is the most important work happening in the US right now. It involves large numbers of working-class people in direct action, acting in solidarity across ethnic, national, and language divides within the working class. This builds solidarity within migrant communities, and is highly visible and confrontational, refusing the legitimacy of this giant group of brutal thugs hired to be loyal to Trump. These are the people who will implement a Nazi state if they’re successful. Directly humiliating and confronting them, and making their work and their lives extremely difficult, is so urgent.
Given the dynamics of the contradictions within the state, where that work is mass, where it’s successful, it drags along other forces. It forces liberal politicians to step up and show a little courage. It draws out some of the contradictions within the control of police departments, control of the military, control of other state institutions. It highlights contradictions within the capitalist class, and it helps cohere an actual effective opposition to Trump in a way that has a potential for actually toppling the regime.
It’s always a complicated question, how anti-fascist work can transition to anti-capitalist work or revolutionary work. Sometimes it can; often it can’t. Somewhat famously, some of the key figures of left communism had no interest in active anti-fascist work for long periods of time during fascism—in part because it often involves collaboration with sections of the capitalist class and liberal politicians.
Foregrounding that ICE is an illegitimate state force may hide the fact that the police and the military and the rest of the state apparatus are also illegitimate state forces. In some ways, carving off ICE as particularly bad is likely to be an effective strategy, but it has a built-in limitation. But it can do something else: it can galvanize a high level of mass working-class confrontation in the streets, where people will have many, many opportunities to use their positions within their jobs to be disruptive of ICE. We’ve seen nurses, teachers, daycare workers, sports coaches directly confront ICE, refuse them admission to buildings—which you have a legal right to do—and successfully disrupt them. We’ve seen many, many people use their working-class positions of social reproduction to disrupt ICE. This shows the potential for building into these rapid-response networks a different kind of solidaristic interrelationship, which can be the foundation of a future political movement. This is real potential, real power. It’s incredibly essential work for everyone to get involved with as urgently as possible.
Andreas Petrossiants (AP): I want to add a small comment about inquiry. A lot of my own work concerns operaismo (workerism) and autonomia (autonomy) in Italy. As the saying goes, ’68 lasted over a decade in Italy. There are a lot of different reasons for that: the composition of struggle, class formation during the “economic miracle,” mass internal migration, the contradictions between the tangible victories of the labor movement and a contracting economy, and so on. But another reason is that militants in Italy at the time were constantly doing inquiries into themselves. It’s well known that workerism developed out of co-research and workers’ inquires in the big northern factories. This didn’t stop in the mid-sixties. By the seventies there were hundreds if not thousands of daily and weekly newspapers, zines, artists’ projects, pirate radio stations. They were all constantly reporting on the state of different struggles, tactics, strategies, what was working and what wasn’t. Poetry and literature were fundamental to those projects.
JB: I realize I didn’t answer the question about literature. As a Situationist—even though you’re not supposed to say you’re a Situationist—I truly believed in the idea of the abolition of art. Maybe I abolished myself as an artist since I don’t really write poetry anymore and just write about communism. But I guess I’m less sure about that now. I want people to write poetry if that’s what they want to do—during and after the revolution. But I also think that people who have creative or aesthetic skills can put them to use in other ways, in practical ways. There is a lot of poetry to revolutionary propaganda and agitation, and I think that poets and writers could devote some of their energy to that.
The other thing I will say is that I really do believe that communism is a kind of aesthetic liberation. In a society in which people are allowed to develop freely, the capacity for creative expression will be multiplied a thousandfold. We have no idea what form art might take under those conditions. I really do believe that communism is a joining of art and life together. Whether we’ll have individual poets or authors, or some form of collective ritual expression like dance parties, I don’t know. But I really do believe that poetry is a kind of promise of a future happiness that will be granted to us fully in communism. The power of aesthetic experience is stunted now and offered to such a small number of people. We have no idea what it would look like if everybody had time to develop themselves. Not everybody wants to be a musician or an artist or poet, but many more people do than are able to now, right? How many wonderful potential poets in the world have been thwarted by poverty? How much of that have we lost? Communism will be, you know, one grand poem.
