s0metim3s writes:

"Critique of Formal Democracy and Representation"

Alessandro Pandolfi

War is what allows the populist sovereign to realise the identification between poeple and sovereignty. War is the use by sovereignty of communication, what I call poverty: the fact of not having the option to subtract oneself form a mechanism where the will of all is immediately the will of the sovereign.

Sovereignty and multitude break this Janus but insist on the same points, and constitute the real. Our teachers told us that this relation is an absolute dualism, between command and the multitude the same tensions arise. Both from the side of command and of multitude we have exited representation (for all the reasons we know already). But why has the multitude exited from representation? There are reasons to believe the multitude is a non representative subject.

First, the multitude must be kept in political passivity and in productive activism, active in production and consumption. It is the most active subject ever conceived in the history materialist production. Second, the latitude of the multitude is unlimited. There is no political codified status to it. The political is all in production, as Virno says, and this makes political representation intolerable. Thirdly, disobedience has no relation to representaiton because it contests the fundamental law of sovereignty: the princile of political obligation. Fourthly exodus, we try and build new grammars, so how can we go to parliament and dislocate the issues of a political argument? It can only mean not accepting the very parliamentary representaiton itself. Fifthly the relation between norm and life: in the multitude the norm is no longer transcendent but rather it is life norm, the path life gives itself as it goes along. So how is this representable?

[The rest of the translation, by Arianna Bove, is here: Generations Online ]

Quirk writes:

"Venture Communism"

Dmytri Kleiner

Venture Communism is a revolutionary investment strategy, a form of workers struggle designed to enclose labour into an anarcho-syndicalist economy which, in the endgame, literally buys the world from the Capitalists.

The Bluffer's Guide to the Political Economy

Wealth and Poverty describe the extremes of entitlement to the productivity of the economy, if your share is large, you are wealthy, if your share is small, you are poor.

All productive capacity of the economy is the result of the application of the three factors of production: Land, Labour and Capital.

hpwombat writes:

"Why We Desire Destruction and Not Socialism"
Heretic and High Priest Wombat, KSC

What is Socialism?

The movements for socialism cannot exist without capitalism and their logic is that of civilization. Critiques of the totality cannot develop within the framework of these movements, only certain things are of value to be critiqued and these movements always have an alternative. If they are not utopian, which to some socialists is desirable, but not necessary, then they are progressive. Reduce pollutants but don't question the logic of work and the technology that drives it. We must put socialism to the question and its ultimate strategy for complete domination, rather than for the end of it.

First there is state socialism, a name we give to the movements and their strategies for achieving progress through state power. All of socialism is justified by some method or appeal to democracy and so participating in a democratic process, such as the election of representatives is just a move towards expanding democracy. According to many socialists, if the majority were given democracy, they would choose progressive policies and may even choose socialism over capitalism, should such a thing ever come to the ballot. Some state socialists are wary of democracy as it stands for one reason or another and opts instead to lead, as a vanguard, the movements for socialism towards their ascension over the state through undemocratic means, but not because they reject democracy but rather they fight for the future of democracy.

Saroj Giri writes:

"Against ‘Reality’
The Maoists in South Asia"

Saroj Giri

In his essay "After the Orgy", Jean Baudrillard, the French post-modernist philosopher, talks about the coming into circulation of revolutionary forces and ideas and their subsequent castration into another marketable social configuration or politically correct idea. So lots of once-revolutionary ideas have today become part of daily parlance, completely punctured of not just their original force but also their meaning. Rather, the perverse recycling of these ideas into the melting pot of liberal discourse has gone on to provide it with an undeserved moral strength and legitimacy. Thus today, with everything from feminism and gay rights to post colonial discourse having gone on to serve the liberal multicultural consensus of global capital, we see that we are living in a hegemonic world order where any attempt to go beyond and concretely envision another world is dismissed by invoking the spectre of 'totalitarianism': that any project for radical transformation of society will almost invariably lead us to totalitarianism.