This is a very scary article about the Israeli army’s use of 1000 Plateaus to re-make their army into a war machine which can more successfully combat the Palestinians (and now Lebanese).

Maybe it’s time to rethink the revolutionary potential of theory as such? 

http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20060801170800738 

No offence to anyone, but I knew there was a reason I didn’t like these guys.  Their plans for radical overhaul of the city sound a lot like extreme right wing versions of the same thing - I for one prefer a Berlin with "Karl-Marx-Straße" to one without.

The Lettrists attending the September 26 meeting jointly put forward the following proposals for solutions to the town planning problems that happened to come up during debate. It is worth noting that no constructive action was decided, since all those present agreed that the most urgent task is to lay the groundwork.

• The subways should be opened at night, after the trains have stopped running. The passageways and platforms should be poorly lit with dim, blinking lights.
• The rooftops of Paris should be opened to pedestrian traffic by means of modifications to fire escape ladders and construction of catwalks where necessary.
• Public gardens should remain open at night, unlit (in some cases, dim lighting might be justified on psychogeographical grounds).
• All street-lamps should be equipped with switches; lighting should be for public use.
• With regard to churches, four different proposals were put forward and all were judged tenable until the appropriate experiments demonstrate which of them is the best.

1. G.-E. Debord argued for the complete demolition of religious buildings of all denominations. (No trace should remain of them and their sites should be used for other purposes.)
2. Gil J. Wolman proposed that churches should be left standing but stripped of all religious content. They should be treated as ordinary buildings. Children should be allowed to play in them.
3. Michèle Bernstein suggested that churches should be partially demolished, so that the remaining ruins give no hint of their original function (tour Jacques, on Boulevard de Sebastopol, being an unintentional example). The ideal solution would be to raze churches to the ground and build ruins in their place. The first alternative was formulated exclusively for reasons of economy.
4. Lastly, Jacques Fillon is in favor of transforming churches into haunted houses (maintaining their current ambience and accentuating their unsettling effects).

• All agreed that aesthetic objections should be over-ruled, that admirers of the great door of Chartes should be silenced. Beauty, when it does not hold the promise of happiness, must be destroyed. And what could better represent unhappiness than this sort of monument to everything in the world that remains to be overcome, to the immense inhuman side of life?
• Train stations should be kept as they are. Their rather moving ugliness adds much to the feeling of transience that makes these buildings mildly attractive. Gil J. Wolman called for removal or scrambling of all information regarding departures (destinations, times, etc.). This would promote the dérive. After a lively debate, those opposing the motion retracted their argument and it was approved without reservation. The aural environment of stations should be enhanced by broadcasting recorded announcements from a large number of different stations – and certain ports.
• Cemeteries should be eliminated. All corpses and memories of that sort should be totally destroyed: no ashes and no remains. (It is necessary to note the reactionary propaganda constituted by these hideous remnants of a past filled with alienation by the most automatic of associations. Is it possible to see a cemetery and not be reminded of Mauriac, Gide or Edgar Faure?)
• Museums should be abolished and their masterpieces distributed to bars (Philippe de Champaigne’s works in the Arab cafes of rue Xavier-Privas; David’s Sacre in the Tonneau in Montagne-Geneviève).
• Everyone should have free access to prisons. They should be available as tourist destinations, with no distinction between visitors and inmates (to make life more amusing, visitors would be eligible, in draws held twelve times a year, to win a real prison sentence. This would be especially aimed at cretins who cannot live without running interesting risks: today’s speleologists, for example, and all those whose craving for games is satisfied by such pale imitations).
• All monuments, the ugliness of which cannot be put to any use (such as the Petit or Grand Palais), should make way for other constructions.
• All remaining statues whose significance has become outmoded – where any possible aesthetic renovations are condemned by history to failure beforehand – should be removed. Their usefulness could be extended during their final years by changing the inscriptions on their plinths, either in a political sense (The Tiger Called Clemenceau on the Champs Élysées) or in a puzzling sense (Dialectical Homage to Fever and Quinine at the intersection of boulevard Michel and rue Comte, or The Deep in the cathedral square on Île de la Cité).
• The dulling influence of current street names on people’s intelligence must be stopped. Names of town councilors, heroes of the Resistance, all Emiles and Edouards (55 Paris streets), all Bugeauds and Gallifets, and in general, all obscene names (rue de l’Evangile) should be removed.In this regard, the appeal launched in Potlatch #9 for ignoring the word saint in place names is even more valid.

"We broke down the doors. The master’s room was wide open. The master’s room was brilliantly lighted, and the master was there, quite calm…and we stopped…He was the master…I entered. ‘It is you,’ he said to me, quite calmly…It was I. It was indeed I, I told him, the good slave, the faithful slave, the slavish slave, and suddenly his eyes were two frightened cockroaches on a rainy day…I struck, the blood flowed: That is the only baptism that I remember today."

In a recent interview, Paolo Virno says: "Whoever mistrusts the movement’s ethical attack, rebuking it for disregarding the class struggle against exploitation, is wrong. But for symmetrical reasons, they are also wrong who, pleased by this ethical attack, believe that the latter might put aside categories such as ‘exploitation’ and ‘the class struggle.’ In both cases, one lets slip the decisive point: the polemical link between the instance of the “good life” and life put to work." 

JC made the recommendation that we look for example of communism’s being-in-extension.  In response, I thought I’d link to some recent comments I posted elsewhere, regarding immigration and Mayday.  As a more literary addendum to that post, some excerpts, below, from Bob Kaufman’s "FRAGMENT FROM PUBLIC SECRET" (the caps are in original): 

"REBELS, WHAT ARE REBELS, HERE IN THIS LAND OF REBELLION, THIS LAND THAT BEGAN WITH REBELLION–ARE THEY THOSE WHOSE ACTIVITIES CAN OBJECTIVELY BE ABSORBED OR ASSIMILATED INTO THE PATTERING TIME, REMEMBER, IT IS NOT IMPORTANT, FOR IN THE END, THE REBEL IS TIMELESS, AND IT IS ONLY IN THE PASSAGE OF TIME THAT WE CAN DISCERN THE REBEL FROM THE DISSENTER.

AMERICA, WHO ARE YOUR REBELS, WHAT SHORES HAVE THEY BEEN CAST UPON? […]"

From one of my favorite passages from H&N’s corpus, found late in _Labor of Dionysus_:

” ‘Real Socialism’–that is, the socialism that actually existed in the Soviet Union and other coutries in Eastern Europe–did not constitute a form of government substantially different than the form invented by capitalism in the course of its development. Or more precisely, its form was only different inasmuch as it was applied to a phase of capitalist development different than that goverened by the capitalist democracies….From the persepective of capitalist development, real socialism was a success: it brought an immense region of the world that waited at the edges of economic development toward the center of the “postindustrial” world and it imposed an extrordinary acceleration on the construction of the world market. One of the major effects of the rise and fall of real socialism, then, was the progresive narrowing of the gap between East and West.

This economic development, we should be clear, certainly brought with it heavy social damages. Alexandar Solzhenitsyn was perfectly right to critize the gulag system of the Satlinist Soviet Union when he did so from the point of view of the most radical anticapitalism and reactionary humanism. On the other hand, those who hold capitalist development as the only possible form of economic and political civilization cannot condemn the gulag in any absolute way. When they do criticize it, in fact, the apologists of captitalism risk conducting an enormous historical whitewash, forgetting both the history of capitalist accumulation and the present gulags of exploitation and segregation, the remains of Vietnam and Iraq, and the terrible desolate spaces of continents ravaged by the effects of capitalist development.”

–H&N, “Potentialities of a Constitutent Power” in _Labor of Dionysus_, 263-64.

On DB’s post re: difficulties, I want to say right out that I really like the move here: lacks become difficulties, and are given–even if they are lent–a certain kind of positive, practical existence. I could not agree more, though perhaps more importantly, I think that it is precisely via the concept of difficulty that we have to come to terms with the realities of just what we are talking about: to speak of commmunism today walks a fine line of falling into the worst–which is to say, debilitating, if not downright deluding–kind of transendence. To say that communism already exists seems so ridiculous–shouldn’t we know better!? Look around us! Even the most banal observations can disprove such a claim: existence, most of the time and in so many ways, simply tells us otherwise. This is not the world we want, and it is profoundly not ours.

Adorno said: impossible to live rightly in a wrong world. I say (with thanks to DB): not impossible, but difficult, fucking dificult. Profoundly so. I think this is what excites me–and certainly challenges me–in the imbrication between communism and ethics. In other words, not how to simply begin, but to (re)ask Lenin’s question: what is to be done? To DB’s Blanchot I would add, or maybe even counter, a quote from one of his most important readers, Jean-Luc Nancy. As Nancy says, to ask Lenin’s question today simply and urgently means: “how to make a world to make a world for which all is not already done (played out, finished, enshrined in a destiny), nor still entirely to do (in the future for always future tomorrows).” Put differently, the stakes are alway purely and importantly practical. I think I have an affinity with DB’s habit–or maybe, to be more fair to his posts, at least the proclivity–to separate the empirical or practical from the conceptual. Of course, conceptualization is a practice, and already so. Additionallly, it is different than what we usually think and categorize as the empirical or practical, and that’s not a bad thing. Creating concepts and creating a world have overlaps, but aren’t always the same. This isn’t a bad thing. (I would refer to Deleuze and Guattari’s _What is Philosophy_ in this regard, a very moving communist text written in the face of the “first” Gulf War). To say otherwise ends up recycling that most reprehensible–though also, by now, most tiring and boring–bourgeois dictum “communism was great in theory, but in practice….” Of course,this notion is true–but for all the wrong reasons that people ever utter such a statement–usually as a profoundly counter-revolutionary justification of representative democracy, multinational capitalism, and the present in its most general (that is to say, violent, constricting, and banally evil) terms. Obviously, the primacy of the State-form in such statements reveals a not-so-secret submission to its overdeterming logic: communism thought by virtue of the State is no communism of ours. To these people,we say “If nothing else, read Marx on the Jewish Question and leave us alone!” (Here, I promise more on this issue, esp. apropos of Mark Grief’s recent article in n+1 magazine, which should be supported and can be found at nplusonemag.com).

With all this said, does this relegate communism to an experience, an epxerience which is all too fleeting and transitory? Much has been written on communist time–but can we cite (or at least imagine, which is to say, image) communism’s being-in-extension? Do we have examples? Do we even need or want them? I’d invite suggestions of all types–I think is a worthy project to try to not just assert a communism of the everyday, existent world which we create, but to name, cite and compile those instances, moments, and settings when and in which communism unfolds–think of it as both a reminder and inspiration, but also a way in which the experiences of communism become commmunicable. The citation of Blancot on writing, then, has already started this project.

"Writing…presupposes a radical change of epoch - death itself, interruption - or, to speak hyperbolically, ‘the end of history,’ and writing thus brushes against the coming of communism, recognized as the ultimate affirmation, as communism always lies beyond communism."

For important news about the Zapatista’s Other Campaign and its solidarity with those in Atenco, check the May 7 blog entry of a friend whose with the campaign.