So last time I laid out something of an elevator pitch for this blog:
This blog is an open notebook, a messy place for bricolage, in my attempts to work out a communist project fit for the 21st century.
This deserves some more detailed elaboration, especially given how contested the term communism is, and to illustrate somewhat the method of bricolage I’ll be doing that by offering up some essential fragments we’ll be drawing on.
Lines of Flight
These texts provide a jumping off point for a project of liberation, founded on the idea that my freedom is inextricably bound up with yours, ultimately without end, but immediately tasked with overcoming capitalist alienation and for the first time making our own history.
- The Revolutionary Wager
- This provides some sense of subjective motivation and stakes. As a text it is mired in its own time and subcultural milieu but if nothing else read the concluding paragraph.
- Further readings - Max Stirner’s ‘The Unique and its Property’ and Ken Macleod’s ‘Fall Revolution’ trilogy.
- Why Anarchism? and The Reproduction of Daily Life
- These two come from different traditions and have very different scopes, but together these provide the beginnings of a Compass for orientating ourselves in the deep time and a Map of capitalist horrorscape of the immediate present.
- In general, the anarchist and marxist spheres will tend to provide fodder for each of these tools respectively. We’re not interested fidelity to real xyz rather in what can be salvaged and put to use for human liberation.
- Further readings - Between Marx, Marxism, and Marxisms
- All Tomorrows Parties
- This provides two vital insights. First, that there is no fixed revolutionary method but rather specific historical conditions create specific openings for struggle. Second that any specific period of struggle demands a new specific form of organisation adequate to the problems thrown up. Therefore what we need is an ecology of organisations, capable of exploring the organisation-space and coalescing and dispersing centres of power (world historical parties).
Spheres of Influence
Here are a few important ongoing influences that will continue to provide input going forward (basically an old-school blog roll).