There was a time when we proclaimed that we were part of a beautiful and fragmented chaos of affinity groups, conflicted organizations, disorganized rebels, all of whom were somehow part of the same social movement that was greater than the sum of its parts. We were more accurately a disorganized mob of enraged plebeians shaking our fists at a disciplined imperial army. Years ago we spoke of social movementism but now it only makes sense to drop the social since this phase of confusion was incapable of understanding the social terrain. Disparate, unfocused, and divided movements lack a unified intentionality; they have proved themselves incapable of pursuing the necessity of communism.

The Communist Necessity

Politics & Social Sciences

Moufawad-Paul, J.

Politics & Government

Kersplebedeb

By 2009, every anti-worker ideologue and their devotees had a popularized concept under which to mobilize their arguments about how and why workers should absorb the excesses of those capitalists who wanted to maintain their wealthy lifestyles: austerity. In this sense, the austerity apparatus is simply that which functions to police the everyday operations of crisis capitalism. In another sense this apparatus is the mobilization of operations that are a normative part of capitalism even without a crisis  But this is simply due to the fact that economic crises are also part of capitalisms day-to-day functioning: capitalism is crisis, implicitly or explicitly.

Austerity Apparatus

Business & Money

Economics

Kersplebedeb Publishing

Five years ago The Communist Necessity was written to demarcate a revolutionary politics grounded in necessity from social movementism, and revolutionary science from contemporary intellectual fads. Now J. Moufawad-Paul’s notorious polemic is back, still relevant and prescient.This second edition of Moufawad-Paul’s first book includes a preface by Dao-yuan Chou and a reflective afterword by the author. New readers can discover why the recognition of communism’s necessity “requires a new return to the revolutionary communist theories and experiences won from history.” “There was a time when we proclaimed that we were part of a beautiful and fragmented chaos of affinity groups, conflicted organizations, disorganized rebels, all of whom were somehow part of the same social movement that was greater than the sum of its parts. We were more accurately a disorganized mob of enraged plebeians shaking our fists at a disciplined imperial army. Years ago we spoke of social movementism but now it only makes sense to drop the ‘social’ since this phase of confusion was incapable of understanding the social terrain. Disparate, unfocused, and divided movements lack a unified intentionality; they have proved themselves incapable of pursuing the necessity of communism.”The Communist Necessity is a polemical interrogation of the practice of “social movementism” that has enjoyed a normative status at the centres of capitalism. Despite the fact that the name “communism” has been reclaimed by a variety of important intellectuals, J. Moufawad-Paul argues that, due to a failure to grapple with the concrete questions connected to historical moments of actually making revolution, movementist praxis remains hegemonic. More of a philosophical intervention than a historiography or political economy, The Communist Necessity engages in a quick and pointed manner with a variety of authors and tendencies including Alain Badiou, Jodi Dean, the Invisible Committee, Tiqqun, Théorie Communiste, and others. Moufawad-Paul argues that a refusal to recognize contemporary revolutionary movements from the 1980s to the present results in the reification of a capitalist “end of history” discourse within this movementist conceptualization of theory and practice.Originally written as a small essay on the left-wing blog MLM Mayhem, The Communist Necessity was expanded into a pocket-sized treatise in 2015, sketching out the boundaries of the movementist terrain, as well as its contemporary ideologues, so as to raise questions that may be uncomfortable for those still devoted to movementist praxis, particularly if they define themselves as marxist. Aware of his past affinity with social movementism, and with some apprehension of the problem of communist orthodoxy, Moufawad-Paul argues that the recognition of communism's necessity “requires a new return to the revolutionary communist theories and experiences won from history.” J. Moufawad-Paul lives in Toronto and works as casualized contract faculty at York University where he received his PhD in philosophy. He is the author of Austerity Apparatus, Continuity and Rupture, and Demarcation and Demystification.Dao-yuan Chou is an organizer and author of Silage Choppers and Snake Spirits.

The Communist Necessity: prolegomena to any future radical theory

Philosophy

"A virus is haunting the globe, one of pandemic proportions, whose threat has necessitated unprecedented measures to forestall death and violence worse than the present crisis. But the cruelty, violence, and depredations that have accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic aren't merely detritus in the wake of its spread; they characterize the necrocapitalism of this conjuncture." - from the Prologue As the pandemic transitioned from science fiction to reality in early 2020, a number of writers and thinkers in the imperialist metropoles declared the impossibility of writing in the face of a future that is foreclosed. And yet, due to the nightmare that capitalism has been since its beginning, numerous writers and thinkers from the margins have always written in the face of such foreclosure. Meanwhile, other contemporary thinkers sought to conceptualize the unfolding pandemic according to conceptions of bio/necropolitics, forgetting the foundation upon which these conceptions have always existed. The M.I. Asma writing group came together to stake out a different terrain, thinking through the pandemic as events unfolded while also always working to think beyond the capitalist imaginary. Writing between April 2020 and May 2021, the authors set out to produce a serial theoretical-philosophical project focused on class struggle in the midst of the COVID--19 pandemic. The authors approached the pandemic as an occasion to think capitalism according to what it always has been, what the pandemic reveals about its current ideological deployment, and how we can think about a communist alternative in the face of exterminism. This book collects, with some revisions and with a new epilogue, the entries from the On Necrocapitalism blog, where M.I. Asma's interventions first appeared. M.I. Asma is the collective designation for six authors from Canada and the United States, representing a variety of revolutionary anticapitalist theoretical persuasions: J. Moufawad-Paul, Devin Zane Shaw, Mateo Andante, Johannah May Black, Alyson Escalante, and D. W. Fairlane.

On Necrocapitalism: A Plague Journal

Literature & Fiction

Shaw, Devin Zane

Asma, M.I.

Black, Johannah May

Escalante, Alyson

Fairlane, D.W.

History & Criticism

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