Species Being and Other Stories - frére dupont

Is there a PDF planned to be attached with this?

I really hope so. A few years back at some anarchist book fair, one dude had a few copies of it. I bought one for a friend who was really into species being, but stupidly did not buy one for myself. I still regret it. While I have my issues with the Dupont Bros, I find them thought provoking. When they used to post on libcom, I remember being pissed off. I later realized that that was a good thing because they were clearly hitting a nerve and making me confront shit I perhaps did not want to think about. Not sure if this text will have that effect today, but I'd like to get my hands on a PDF regardless.

If you're in North America, you should be able to order it through LBC if no PDF gets uploaded:
http://littleblackcart.com/books/communism/species-being-and-other-stories/

This little collection of 'stories' and arguments is in a style I didn't find so easy to follow through when I read it a few years back. It's a difficult subject in some ways and contrary to my old comrades in the Nihilist Communist team I found the extended discussion over several issues of Internationalist Perspective more useful, starting around here: http://internationalist-perspective.org/IP/ip-archive/ip_43_species-being.html Edit: Now at:
https://internationalistperspective.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IP043.pdf

Thanks sabot. I think I may just make an order from them; I do prefer the dead tree format.

dendrite303

i'm not certain why the link isn't showing. presumably it will soon. otherwise you can download it here:

Usually when anyone makes an edit, an admin or mod has to accept it first. I've now accepted the revision and the link is showing.

Thanks for uploading the PDF!

The ‘problem’ with the concept of the ‘species being’ is that, as Frere Dupont (FD) noted, it is not well-theorised, even though one aspect of it appears to be a fundamental part of the modern general worldview.

There are perhaps two basic theoretical routes indicated by the term. One, extrapolated and developed from Feuerbach, and employed by, if you like, Althusser’s second-half Marx (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Marx), is that humans have the capacity to transcend, through their conscious collective activity, all previous forms of existence. Previous (and current) forms of human existence are regarded here, by Marx, Feuerbach, Kant, Hobbes, as well as apparently divergent modern philosophers such as Steven Pinker and Christopher Boehm, etc, etc., as restrictive of human potential. In this schema - which is the modern schema - we are all on Hegel’s historical road. This could be argued to be the scientific basis of the project of the radical enlightenment (see Jonathan Israel, ‘Radical Enlightenment,’ 2001, or ‘Revolution of the Mind’ 2010) and ‘radical democracy’ or communism itself (see Frederic Lordan, ‘Willing Slaves of Capital,’ 2014). It is the notion that is evident in the modern worldview – see Harari below. The other, much less ‘scientific’ and much more visceral - or, if you like, much more first-half Marx - route is that taken by Frere Dupont, in which the notion of species being becomes the exploration of proletarian “bloody-mindedness” or the “for-human” (FD: x).

FD describes this blood-mindedness, or the for-human, as something that is rarely investigated, or taken into account by pro-revolutionaries, if ever. Even though “the for-human reflex” exerts a perpetual influence on the world (FD: viii). He lists the qualities of the for-human as its “irreducibility, its immutability, its ahistoricalness” – that together form “the constants of the position of refusal” (FD: viii).

Short elaboration/detour. An example might be the end of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930’s. Once the war for the revolution was superseded by the war against the Fascists, proletarians began to sense that everything was over. While Durutti and others fought on to lose the war against the Fascists, the majority of proletarians started packing up and going home, slipping away and putting their heads down. There is a wealth of written material on the heroic actions of people like Durutti and others who held out against impossible odds, but there is little or no material on those who stopped and slipped away – not that slipping away was any guarantee against being rounded up and exterminated later by the new government. (Was it better to be shot by the Fascists in battle, or shot later in a round up, or was it better to live through the Franco dictatorship? These are the impossible questions that face proletarians. How do we want to die, how do we want to live? What choices do we have?) This is not to validate the actions of ‘more realistic’ State-builders such as Garcia Oliver though (see text and comments: https://libcom.org/history/%E2%80%9Crevolutionary-syndicalism-serves-proletariat-whereas-anarchism-one-brand-humanism%E2%80%9D-inte ). Although he may have understood better than Durutti the ‘hopelessness’ of the situation, his leadership was as divergent from the proletarian for-human reflex as any ideological, political, or controlling stance. To take this further, any form of leadership could be viewed as an expression of the desire to control others. This is the eternal philosophical and practical problem for anarchists, and why the Marxists look with such disdain at their prevarication. How long has it taken in the past for ‘leaders of ideas’ to become the facilitators of rackets and death camps. The difference between Mao and Alain Badiou (and his party-less Maoism), for example, probably lies only in Badiou’s lack of practical ‘success.’ It is interesting to see the current convergence of ideas between Marxists who have lost faith in the party (eg Zizek, Badiou) and communisers who speak of a time when the Party had its historical place. Endnotes wrote in 2011: “To hold to councilist or Leninist conceptions of revolution now is utopian[.] The class struggle has outlived programmatism [meaning: proletarians seizing the existing architectures of power to use for their own ends, that is, building the transitional State], and different shapes now inhabit its horizon” (Endnotes 2011: 27). Maoist philosopher Alain Badiou, good friend of the Jacobinist Zizek, writes in 2010: “We know today that all emancipatory politics must put an end to the model of the party, or of multiple parties, in order to affirm a politics ‘without party,’ and yet at the same time without lapsing into the figure of anarchism, which has never been anything else than the vain critique, or the double, or the shadow, of the communist parties, just as the black flag is only the double or the shadow of the red flag” (Badiou 2010: 155). Although both writers seem to acknowledge the appropriateness of Leninism in the past and the inappropriateness, or ‘utopianism,’ of it now, the Marxist Badiou, like Rosa Luxembourg long before him (for her anarchists were “the ideological signboard of the counterrevolutionary lumpenproletariat” – ‘The Mass Strike,’ 1906), still hates the prevarication of the ‘anarchists.’ So whether the communisers and the Marxists get together in the future - in the bucket labelled ‘leaderless Leninism’ - is open to speculation.

The for-human (its ‘species being’ in this context) acts against history as such. For pro-revolutionaries this is a constant source of bewilderment. FD writes: “In an epoch overrun by history, the for-human becomes important because it is not in play. It is that which exists invariably, and yet consistently goes unvalued. […] Or to reverse the formulation, the for-human is a characteristic that is so continuously manifested within the lives of proletarianised human beings that it passes as wholly insignificant. An example of this nonrecognition is found within the conventional form of pro-revolutionary consciousness, which is typically geared to recognise and respond to activity” (FD: viii-ix).

Yes, it is worth reading ‘Species Being’ by Frere Dupont.

It is also worth reading the contribution by IP suggested above by SpikeyMike, but for very different reasons. The reflections of IP are set within the Enlightenment framework in which Marx worked, particularly in his presumed second-half, and, indeed, within which all those who develop a theoretical support or cautious theoretical or conceptual accommodation with the notion of ‘progress,' and capitalism itself, work. I know that this last statement is not only badly written but contentious for many, but my view is that it is worthy of repeated consideration.

Below is something not written for that purpose but that could be viewed as a kind of translucent response to the IP text linked to above (and here: http://internationalist-perspective.org/IP/ip-archive/ip_43_species-being.html ).

When Karl Marx elaborated his theory that humanity had moved in history through various modes of production, he also opened up the notion that people are formed by the era in which they live in terms of what they actually do each day (Foucault, as we shall see below, took this notion further). That is, the way they made their living underpinned who they were. In Grundrisse, Marx explores the simultaneity of production and consumption and repeats several times that “production is consumption” in the sense that: “Each is immediately its opposite. But at the same time a mediating movement takes place between the two. […] Without production, no consumption; but also, without consumption, no production; since production would then be purposeless. Consumption produces production in a double way, because a product becomes real only by being consumed” (Marx 1978: 229). One can see here how a mode of production, ancient or feudal or capitalist or whatever, because it is an inescapable interaction between how one survives and how one lives, creates the epoch or culture or “organic whole” (Marx 1978: 236) of people who exist in certain times in certain places. He writes: “Different communities find different means of production and different means of subsistence in their natural environment. Hence their modes of production and living, as well as their products, are different” (Marx 1976: 472).

If one then connects these conceptions with Marx’s assertion that: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness” (Marx 1978: 4), then one is able to begin to view people as different in different situations or epochs. Indeed, as Marxist anthropologist Thomas Patterson writes: “It is important to note […] that Marx believed that ‘human nature’ was not fixed but varied from one historical epoch to another” (Patterson: 88). And as Marx himself writes, the mode of production dictates “the form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. […] The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production” (Marx 1978: 150 original emphasis). That is, what one does daily in one’s life becomes the source of one’s perspective, not some overarching presumed universal fixed human rationality projected back-and-forth through time and across cultures.

One can extract from the notion of modes of production, as Marx does, the interesting idea of modes of living, in which one is able to separate the perspectives of peoples who live different daily lives. The notion of modes of living based on different ways of living, or different daily existences is potentially far more significant as an analytical tool than the notion of modes of production because, since Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Marshall Sahlins, Pierre Clastres and Jean Baudrillard, we know of at least one type of human society that is not a society of production (that of the badly named ‘hunter-gatherer’ society). But taking the notion of modes of living seriously requires a deep cautiousness in the attempt to understand the motivations and actions of people who live in different societies (even societies of production, such as feudal societies) to the point even of accepting that we cannot ever fully understand their perspective because we cannot see through their socially constructed eyes. Marx’s claim (which is now a founding principle in academia) that individuals in different societies can be understood once their mode of production, their economy, is explained (Marx 1976: 175-176 fn35) comes unstuck within this methodology, even for all the different societies with economy. Not because we cannot view, or read descriptions of all the things they actually did each day, but because we cannot see the world through their eyes. To presume that we understand what is was like to be a medieval European serf because we have worked out many of the things they did each day, including, for example, what they wore and what they ate, is to presume too much. We cannot get inside their socially constructed heads. Those who say we can are basing their assertion on the belief that all humans in all epochs generally think the same way and generally view the world in the same way (we have a possible problem within this narrative here in the form of an interesting connection with the idea that human recalcitrance observed in its modern context, in FD’s perspective, might be a universal human trait transcending all others, thereby refuting Michel Foucault’s insistence that history cannot be written on such a basis. In ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,’ Foucault writes: ‘We believe, in any event, that the body obeys the exclusive laws of physiology and that it escapes the influence of history, but this too is false. The body is moulded by a great many distinct regimes; it is broken down by the rhythms of work, rest, and holidays; it is poisoned by food or values, through eating habits or moral laws; it constructs resistances. "Effective" history differs from traditional history in being without constants. Nothing in man - not even his body - is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men [sic].’)

Marx was of the opinion that through dialectical processes people were shaped and determined by all the various pressures and motivations, or conditions and ambitions, of the epoch in which they lived, but suggested that the Enlightenment, the scientific method, and the development of the productive forces in capitalism made possible a leap out of these epochal constraints on humanity into a situation where humans could become completely self-directed universal and social beings. If the masses of proletarians, through their collective class struggle against exploitation, began to understand the trajectory of history and their key position within these new, unlimited, productive conditions, then they held in their hands the power to change the world so radically that all mystification, all irrationality, all economic instability could be left behind. But it was by working with, and extending philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach’s notion of species-being that Marx was able to create what he thought was a scientific basis for the socialist logic that asserts that if humans live as free and equal entities they can also freely express their full social human potential. Marx came to insist that individual human beings could not be usefully explained by examination of abstractions that could be identified in each individual but needed to be understood as principally determined by the ever-transforming “ensemble of social relations” (Marx 1978: 145).

This is explained by Marxist philosopher Sean Sayers who argues that prior to capitalism, the activity of humans, in terms of work, was intended to satisfy the (apparently) natural desire to survive. Thus their ‘species activity’ was at one with their life. With the arrival of wage labour, the species activity became fully separated from their life, because now it is no longer a question of doing things that are directly related to one’s survival, like hunting or farming, it is now merely a question of doing any type of work for which one will be paid. This intensification and amplification of the division of labour does two things. First of all, it “constitutes a step on the way towards our emancipation from purely natural conditions” (Sayers: 92). Secondly, it produces a real alienation from all the things that constitute our species-being, read here as our natural social being. Once proletarians were able to connect the possibilities that the productive forces now provided via a measure of global abundance to the way to abolish their alienation by creating a rational social life, then the human species-being or its natural social essence, could be re-asserted. It was in making these connections, Marx believed, that philosophy could be wrenched from its contemplative tradition and be turned into something that changed the world (Marx 1978: 143-145).

He arrived at this position through a critique of the philosophical ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach, who himself had arrived at his conjectures through a critique of the work of Hegel. Feuerbach elaborated on the Descartian notion that humans were the only thinking animal by suggesting that the difference between animals and humans lay in the fact that animals possess an “inner life [which] is one with the outer” while humans possess an inner life and an outer life as two distinct entities, that nevertheless, of course, operate on each other (Feuerbach: 270-271). Crucially, the inner life produces a self or reflexive consciousness (Feuerbach: 98). For Feuerbach, the special thing about humanity is that it is not limited like other animals that can, for example, only live in their own world and can only eat their own food. Humans, in contrast, are, in contrast to Foucault’s thinking, universalised by their very bodies. They can, for instance, choose anything to eat. In Feuerbach’s conception, the bodies and dispositions of humans, echoing Amerindian concepts of perspective, are extremely important. He goes on to claim that “even the stomach of man, no matter how contemptuously we look down upon it, is something human and not animal because it is universal; that is, not limited to certain kinds of food. […] Leave a man his head, but give him the stomach of a lion or a horse, and he will certainly cease to be a man” (Feuerbach: 242 original emphasis).

For Feuerbach, humans not only possess a body and set of dispositions that tend towards their universalisation. They are also able to reflect on the world in terms of the species, including the human species, that inhabit it. That is, humans are able to perform, though perhaps to a lesser degree of skill, or rather, without the instinctual accuracy, many of the innate characteristics of other animals. This level of consciousness enables “the capacity to produce systematic knowledge or science” and so, the reflexive consciousness of humans becomes particularly powerful through science, which is “the consciousness of species” (Feuerbach: 98 original emphasis).

However, the development of scientific knowledge has transformed this collective consciousness. The methodology of science has transformed the human “universal being” into a collective being that, as a collective being, possesses unlimited consciousness and unlimited knowledge (Feuerbach: 93, 242). Individual humans are limited in themselves in that no one human can discover or know everything that has been revealed by natural science. But as a universal being, this access is unlimited. That is, individual man has access to all the revelations of science, even if it would be impossible to absorb every single one. This makes the human, as a species-being, essentially capable of “divine knowledge” by which is meant, of course, everything (Feuerbach: 189). It is from this vantage point that Marx and all those who followed, Marxist or otherwise, were able to conclude that people now, with their scientific consciousness, could discover all there was to know about all human societies, including their own. This makes our species-being, our humanness as a collective, for the first time in history, potentially omniscient and omnipresent (Feuerbach: 189-190). In 2011, historian Yuval Noah Harari, in the internationally best-selling Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, echoes this notion, though perhaps in cruder terms, when he writes: “Today [humanity] stands on the verge of becoming a god, poised to acquire not only eternal youth, but also the divine abilities of creation and destruction” (Harari: page 415).

Because Marx and Harari both work within the same umwelt (Enlightenment, progress, history, democracy – all elements of the physical construction of capitalism) despite the years between them, they both essentially indicate the same choice for human beings inside a narrative that they also, naturally, believe could go either way.

References:
Badiou, A. 2010, The Communist Hypothesis, David Macey and Steve Corcoran (trans.), Verso, London.
Endnotes 2011, What are we to do? in Communization and its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles, Benjamin Noys (ed), Minor Compositions, New York.
Feuerbach, L. 2012, The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings, Zawar Hanfi (ed. and trans.), Verso, London. (See also Hanfi’s intro, p 21.)
Frere Dupont 2007, Species Being and Other Stories, Ardent Press, US.
Marx, K. 1976, Capital, A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, Ben Fowkes (trans.), Penguin Books, London.
Marx, K. 1978, The Marx-Engels Reader, Robert C. Tucker (Ed), W. W. Norton and Company, New York.
Patterson, T. C. 2009, Karl Marx, Anthropologist, Berg, Oxford.
Sayers, S. 2013, Marx and Alienation: Essays on Hegelian Themes, Palgrave Macmillan, London.

Oh, yes, I forgot to mention, Khawaga. I am, as you may have guessed, one of the Bros... :)

Just don't tell the others...

Good to know Henry Tom ;)

Thanks for this-- some interesting thoughts here, and a good primer on the subject. It probably deserves a space of it's own in the library

Just seems to me that people are formed both ''..by the era in which they live in terms of what they actually do'' and by a deeper species based 'human nature' but one which has been suppressed and overlaid by many centuries of class society with capitalism as it's most damaging. Different theories have tended to emphasise one or the other of these core influences though I'm not convinced that there is necessarily such a distinction to be made between the early and the late Marx in this respect which I had thought IP in it's earlier discussions had tried to consider. How those two influences interact with each other then changes with each successive social development, but although we cannot 'experience' ourselves today what it was to live in previous societies we can surely distinguish some key social differences? Given the effects of centuries of class society that have passed since the demise of the 'hunter gatherer' world there seems no way that we could recreate exactly the same unmediated human experience but maybe we could use our collective consciousness (informed in part by the contributions of such as FD/TH amongst many others) to eventually create the foundations of a society that would allow movement towards some approximation of what we imagine that to be? Could the two influences in us, the 'species being' and the class experience, combine to open up new possibilities of a rupture with the system? Let's hope so!

Now at the risk of a detour couldn't avoid mentioning that the example TH gave of the Spanish Civil War reminded me of the sometimes acrimonious debates we had around both the 'ultra-left' 'Refusal of Work' ideas and more particularly Michael Seidman's Spanish Civil War social history written from a different perspective.