"Peace-for-War"

Brian Holmes

The concept I’m going to present draws directly from the work of Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan. It describes the economic phases of "depth" and "breadth," and correlates them with the first- and second-order cybernetics of control.

It attempts to situate the functions of cultural-communicational labor within these economic phases. It questions those autonomist Marxists who thought it would be possible to transform a broadly expansionary phase of capitalism, like that of the ‘90s, into a qualitatively different society. It’s not a polemic, but seeks to open up a field of strategic debate. It doesn’t assert a future, but observes the unfolding of the present into the depths of violence, which has robbed resistance movements of their potential, again. The concept is Peace-for-War.

At stake here is society itself: the really existing forms of social cooperation. The Argentinean activist, Ezequiel Adamovsky, writes about exactly that: “Today, the division of labor is so deep, that each minute, even without realizing it, each of us is relying on the labor of millions of people from all over the world.” (1) This text, the words, the images, my voice through the microphone or over the Internet, is literally brought to you by the labors of Asia, the Americas, Africa and Europe combined. The question is, what guides the dynamics of our worldwide cooperation? How is order maintained? And why does this “order” descend periodically into chaos, as it’s doing now in the Middle East?

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Delusional Expectations"

John Chuckman

At this writing, Israel has killed six hundred civilians in Lebanon, including more than one hundred children, and killed another one hundred and fifty in Gaza. It has created hundreds of thousands of refugees and destroyed enough bridges and power stations and apartments to create misery for years to come.

Nothing is more dishonest than attempting to justify this barbarism with "Islamist fundamentalists declare their goal openly to destroy the state of Israel and kill Jews."

There is no possibility that Israel can be destroyed by Islamic fundamentalists: the notion is simply a fantasy. This is so not just because of Israel's ready willingness to bomb and kill, but because of great-power guarantees. It is so also because no Arab state believes any longer that Israel’s destruction is a sensible or possible goal, despite their leaders’ public rhetoric. And it is true because the enemies Israel claims are so threatening, organizations such as Hezbollah or Hamas, are militarily weak by any rational standard of calculation.

Angelus Novus writes:

"Invaders from Marx:
On the Uses of Marxian Theory, and the Difficulties of a Contemporary Reading
– A Critical Engagement with Karl Heinz Roth and others"
Michael Heinrich

[The following text is the slightly reworked version of an article which appeared on 21 September 2005 in Jungle World, a leftist German weekly newspaper. In a previous issue, Karl Heinz Roth, one of the main German representatives of Operaismo, had argued that some important Marxian categories are not able to grasp contemporary capitalism. The text at hand answers this critique, stressing the difference between Marxian theory and traditional Marxism, emphasizing the “new reading of Marx”, which developed through the last decades. The German text can be found at the website of the author: here]

In the past 120 years, Marx has been read and understood in widely varying ways. In the Social Democratic and Communist worker’s movement, Marx was viewed as the great Economist, who proved the exploitation of the workers, the unavoidable collapse of capitalism, and the inevitability of proletarian revolution. This sort of “Marxist political economy” was embedded in a Marxist worldview (Weltanschauung) which provided answers for all pre-existing historical, social, and philosophical questions.

This omniscient Marxism was analytically useless, but was eminently well-suited as a means of propaganda and as an instrument of authority against those who questioned the party line. Already in the 1920s and 1930s, a Left critique of such Marxism emerged, but was nonetheless choked off by Stalinism and Fascism and did not receive a hearing in the Cold War era. This situation began to change in the 1960s, as Marx was read anew during the rise of the student movement and protests against the Vietnam War. A New Left arose beyond the classical worker’s movement which saw itself positioned on two fronts: on the one hand against the global capitalist system, on the other hand against an authoritarian and dogmatically petrified Communist movement, which was viewed as a force propping up domination.

This new Left was anything but unified. As regards the critique of Marxist orthodoxy, one can distinguish, to strongly simplify, between two major directions. One tendency criticized the trade unions and left political parties for viewing the workers as an object to be managed and not as a subject capable of struggle and resistance. The theoretical foundations of this controlling, dominating relationship to the working class were located in the objectivism and economism of traditional Marxism. Class struggle, as opposed to objective economic laws, was emphasized as the decisive motor of societal development.

This meant that, in this particular reading of Marx, one either alleged an economism in Marx’s “ripe”, economic works, or emphasized those passages which dealt with struggle and social classes. Such a direction was especially represented in the 1960s by the tendency of Italian Operaismo, which spread in the 1970s to other countries. In West Germany, it was primarily Karl Heinz Roth and the journal Autonomie who oriented towards this approach (cf Wright 2002 for a history of Italian Operaismo; texts of Karl Heinz Roth can be found in Frombeloff 1993).