this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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Communism

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For the abolition of the current state of things

Questions are appreciated. Debate and discussion, when emphatic, is welcome.

Please do not do atrocity denial, authoritarian apologia, whataboutism, or anti-communism. The general toxicity of Lemmygrad and Hexbar are not welcome here.

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don't get it fucked up. "nice shit for everybody" in that one essay from 10 years ago does mean just that; but the intent of what was written was to link this fucken vibe to an antipolitical communist tendency. the point was that in the extralegal sense (crime!), the pursuit of the commodity, at great risk by the dispossessed, is a part of the forefront of the struggle against the racial regime of Capital today.

but the Leftist sees the looter and sees a prole that can be reformed. They see someone that could be integrated into the project of creating the worker's utopia, but not yet. clearly they got initiative. but the Leftist sees the desire of the looter as somehow deformed or misguided. yes, the Leftist promises heaven on earth but first you must fall in line with the Party, you must submit yourself to experts whose whole lineage is a line of failed parties and/or mass organizations, you must be willing to work EVEN MORE, you must become a cog in the Party Machine. the only difference is this machine promises a collective heaven, not the hyper-individualistic one of the world of capitalism. an inversion that has historically created yet another elite as the rest of us scrape by with shit work, but now we call each other comrade.

on the other page are some words written 54 years ago and yet they are closer to the beat of today than much of the dull Left who have assumed looters in the past few years as either 'police provocateurs' or those simply exploiting a situation (which they are! but they view this negatively). the key here is that the looter does not wait for a call from the Party, or even the Federation. the looter understands even more directly that the parading of affluence while so many are fucking broke is not only disgusting, it is a situation which is worth fighting back against directly and looking fresh while doing it.

"The looter takes the “affluent” society at its word. [They accept] the abundance, only [they don't submit themselves] to the suffering that the society inflicts on those who sacrifice themselves for what it encourages them to want. [They want] to possess the commodities shown to [them] everywhere, in the shop windows, in the media, while rejecting the rules of exchange and the sacrifice they entail. [They reject] the commodity form which encloses goods in its grip and moulds them according to the motives of profit, according to the false needs created by Madison Avenue.

Once the commodity is not paid for, it is open to practical criticism; it becomes a toy, the principle of play takes over. Stealing as opposition to the organization of society is the negation of the rationality of the commodity. The goods can be put to the service of a radical subjectivity free from the sacrifices that perpetuate commodity production and consumption and they Find themselves on a new field, the field of play. The commodity is freed to be used in the destruction of the bourgeois world and ipso facto in its own destruction. Only when the means of production become toys for the manipulation of the proletariat, the class which ends class society, will life be freed from hierarchical subordination to commodity values."

~ "Riot & Representation: The Significance of the Chicano Riot" by 1044 (1970)

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