Can we find alternatives to the failed radical projects of the twentieth century? What are the possible forms of struggle today? How do we fight back against the misery of our crisis-ridden present?
‘Communization’ is the spectre of the immediate struggle to abolish capitalism and the state, which haunts Europe, Northern California and wherever the real abstractions of value that shape our lives are contested. Evolving on the terrain of capitalism new practices of the ‘human strike’, autonomous communes, occupation and insurrection have attacked the alienations of our times. These signs of resistance are scattered and have yet to coalesce, and their future is deliberately precarious and insecure.
Bringing together voices from inside and outside of these currents Communization and Its Discontents treats communization as a problem to be explored rather than a solution. Taking in the new theorizations of communization proposed by Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee, Théorie Communiste, post-autonomists, and others, it offers critical reflections on the possibilities and the limits of these contemporary forms, strategies, and tactics of struggle.
Contributors: Jasper Bernes, John Cunningham, Endnotes, Alexander R. Galloway, Maya Andrea Gonzalez, Anthony Iles, Leon de Mattis, Nicole Pepperell, Théorie Communiste, Alberto Toscano, Marina Vishmidt, and Evan Calder Williams.
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Awesome that this is on-line. Communizing the expensive text books
Wow thanks for uploading this! Am currently tinkering around with the hideously unweildy text file so we should have the text and PDF up soon!
Great! You could do it a chapter at a time, that's what I usually do.
Just started going through this. The intro is pretty good for an introduction to communization and the the first chapter where Endnotes take on the Invisible Committee is probably the best critique of The Coming Insurrection I've seen so far.
Yep, totally agree with this, the Endnotes chapter is excellent. Just started the 'Communization and the Abolition of Gender' chapter, which also has a nice concise description of communization.
Really looking forward to that one - saw Maya reading from it at Historical Materialism conf and was pretty impressed. Really really good to hear gender being discussed like this.
Someone has to get that Endnotes piece in the library. I may do it myself if no one else has the time.
I know that Ramona was planning on doing some of it - maybe send her a private message. You could start at each end and meet in the middle!
Endnotes is up now... slowly slowly
Just out of curiosity, is it known what the people who wrote this book do for a living?
No idea. I assume most if not many are in education of some sort.
academic theoreticians
Yep, professional intelligentsia. I find that I am amused by reading communization theory almost as much as when I read "Peace Love and Petrol Bombs." Since the Marxists have nothing left (aside from the likes of Negri, Zizek, and Badiou -- yuck) the more intelligent have been forced to come to most of the same conclusions that many anarchists made nearly a hundred years ago.
Communisation is surprisingly popular with students.
there is some really good essays in this, some filler too though, a couple seem to be more interested in communisation as a literary genre, much like all the Situ wannabes of old.
Endnotes is good as ever and I really loved Nicole Pepperell's piece, especially the critique of the frankfurt school and instrumental reason etc.
Are any of them really that good? Communisation just seems like a nice theory for student communists doing activism rather than being a serious contribution to communist theory.
nah some of it's pretty good, give it a read, I think the collection is a fair summary of the communisation spectrum, some really good stuff with insight, some stuff that is essentially a new form of economic determinism, and like I said some vapid pretentious wannabe shit that reads like a communisation genre piece.
Which is the more insightful stuff? I know a few people that rate "Alberto Toscano, Marina Vishmidt, and Evan Calder Williams". I've tried reading a lot of it but I give up quickly.
The Alberto Toscano essay is good in this, it is quite critical of communisation.
The Nicole Pepperell piece is excellent and the Endnotes stuff.
Maya Andrea Gonzalez's essay starts of with a bog standard tautological communisation is the abolishment of... but turns into a pretty damn good analysis of feminism and wage labour.
Yeah Toscano and Gonzalez's pieces are good. And also it's not all in favour of communisation theory, hence the title.
Reading this at the moment. The Nicole Pepperell essay was as boring as shit. Some stuff seems interesting but it's far too academic for me. I just feel like giving up on it tbh.