I am glad the election is over, because through the weeks of opportunism, integrating myself into the campaign, I have watched myself getting stupider. It has felt like lopping off, day by day, each organ of perception. Sometimes the cause of communism calls for this type of self-barbarisation: but it’s also worth trying to take hold of the fucking blunted dullness that induces. It is difficult to tell if what I’m writing comes out of the stupidity or my resistance to it. Probably both.
I spent a lot of the last five weeks mixing campaigning with listening to the audiobook of The Golden Notebook. That great work of communist splitting, now remixed, now split again. Since the results came in lots of people are talking about “political education” and “community organising”. I consider these to be empty concepts. They are cries of people who have realised that there is something missing in what they thought they were doing right – but those people are worst of all to find out how to fill that emptiness. I am not a vanguardist, but I will make claims for the communist avant-gardes. For histories that are for us and only us (in some secret compact between all generations). That there are these most extraordinary of works that are ours – and lots of us have our own communist canons and countercanons. I think everyone should read or listen to Lessing. Or pick up some Jelinek. Go grab some Aime Cesaire, or some Rene Menil. Go to the Blake exhibition at the Tate – and maybe a few hundred of us can go all at once and refuse to pay to go in, and we will explain that they can’t stop us because Blake was a communist. Recite some Rimbaud or Ulrike Meinhof. Get with the Latin American communist poets like Huidobro or Vallejo. Perform some Brecht for your children. Go pirate some Pasolini or some Fassbinder or some Petri.
And it’s not just things of the past. There continues to be this feverishly exciting, virtuosic communist production. Here’s just some things I loved this years that changed how I saw the world, changed how I acted: Sophie Lewis’ Full Surrogacy Now; all of Anne Boyer’s writing; And all of Sean Bonney’s too; Verity Spott’s Click Away Close Door Say; Caspar Heinemann’s Novelty Theory. And these are just people close to me, my friends and loved ones, because this fucking torrential underground is as full with the living as it is with the dead. There is so much more.
And these are – in the end – all quite simple things, often made in stolen hours or years. Simple at least compared to the world that we are collectively and perversely producing and reproducing together, with communism the perversion of the perversion (far better and more beautiful and more painful and more forceful than the negation of the negation.) We have to think the world as well, sometimes as simple as a crystal yet so full of tenderness. And that’s what all these great communist avant-gardists were capable of, just as Marx was – even if in them and in their work the crystal is sometimes cracked.
Maybe that’s why I don’t like “community organising” or “political education” – because in how programmatic or awfully practical these proposals are they stamp out everything I’ve learned from these torrents of communist virtuosity. They are as mediocre as they sound, and resigned too. Someone’s gonna come on here and accuse me of intellectualism. Please instead fuck off.
What once excited me about Corbynism was the promise of a politics that wasn’t just about some people in Parliament: the promise of a changed politics that changed the world, and within which the relations between politics and the world would also be changed. I think that’s true for a lot of other people too. And that is long in the past now. By 2017 Corbynism was set on a course of mere parliamentarianism: the tasks established for its popular base nothing more than cheerleading through Twitter about how great they thought it all was, or reading opinion polls like tea leaves, as enthusiasts for their own good fortune. Or even worse the task became a type of collective introversion in which the committed ones built ever more baroque policy castles in the air, veritable King Ludwigs of social democracy. The two processes are conjoined: the first in which historical action is exchanged for mere spectatorship; the second in which politics is exchanged for policy, the means of social transformation exchanged for toying with the various fantastic imagined ends. What was rancid in the project was that their collective dreams – yes dreams – were things like “Keynesian deficit spending” and “a reorganisation of the benefits system” or “better public transport.” And I don’t decry it easily, because these are things really would help lots of people to survive who will be horribly murdered, who will suffer brutality, whose cries will be silenced. But also these are shit dreams compared to COLLECTIVELY BUILDING A WORLD OF FREEDOM, EXPLODING PAST INJUSTICE INTO HAPPINESS, THE SHAPES OF FIRE, THE UNBABBLING OF LANGUAGE INTO TONE THAT KNOWS NO PURITY OR IMPURITY, REVELATION OF THE BEAUTY OF THINGS INTHEMSELVES, THE RECONCILIATION OF NATURE AND HISTORY, THE ANNIHILATION OF CLASS SOCIETY, GLORIOUS ILLUMINATION, THE FORCE THAT STRIKES DOWN THE POWERFUL, THE END OF ALIENATION, PERPETUAL BLISS etc.
And I mean yes this is stupid and sloganistic, a sort of golden calfism that is no good without knowing at the same time that each and every one of these are diverted through the most fragile and difficult particularities of lived experience – as much through that with which we give each other strength as through how we oppress and destroy each other. And the tension is finding how other people do these things, try to say them, how we as a collective fail to be collective.
But you know how stupid it makes us not to even dream these things, not to be even lightly touched by them in every moment (or not to be able to perceive that we are already lightly touched by them). The communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. One of the worst things that can come of us is to be fooled by our own opportunism. I am slowly going to try to make myself and those around me less stupid than I have been and would like friends and comrades to help. This isn’t about Enlightenment or Bildung. This isn’t about finding agreement or any more doxasticism in this world where opinion and its parasitic monopolies has overflowed truth. It is about struggle and negativity. It is without ends. And all force to us.