The Society of the Spectacle has a reputation for being a difficult communist text, but hopefully interpretive dance makes it easier to understand!

So tempeh is soybeans or lentils fermented in tempeh starter. The soybeans or lentils get embedded in mycelium grown from tempeh starter. But is it possible to just get a whole mushroom meat slab with just all mycelium? Or does tempeh starter really need soybeans or lentils to grow?

At its root, capitalism is an economic system based on three things: wage labour (working for a wage), private ownership or control of the means of production (things like factories, machinery, farms, and offices), and production for exchange and profit.

While some people own means of production, or capital, most of us don't and so to survive we need to sell our ability to work in return for a wage, or else scrape by on benefits. This first group of people is the capitalist class or "bourgeoisie" in Marxist jargon, and the second group is the working class or "proletariat". See our introduction to class here for more information on class.

Capitalism is based on a simple process -- money is invested to generate more money. When money functions like this, it functions as capital. For instance, when a company uses its profits to hire more staff or open new premises, and so make more profit, the money here is functioning as capital. As capital increases (or the economy expands), this is called 'capital accumulation', and it's the driving force of the economy.

Those accumulating capital do so better when they can shift costs onto others. If companies can cut costs by not protecting the environment, or by paying sweatshop wages, they will. So catastrophic climate change and widespread poverty are signs of the normal functioning of the system. Furthermore, for money to make more money, more and more things have to be exchangeable for money. Thus the tendency is for everything from everyday items to DNA sequences to carbon dioxide emissions -- and, crucially, our ability to work - to become commodified.

And it is this last point - the commodification of our creative and productive capacities, our ability to work - which holds the secret to capital accumulation. Money does not turn into more money by magic, but by the work we do every day.

In a world where everything is for sale, we all need something to sell in order to buy the things we need. Those of us with nothing to sell except our ability to work have to sell this ability to those who own the factories, offices, etc. And of course, the things we produce at work aren't ours, they belong to our bosses.

"When Insurrections Die" is one of the modern classic works on anti-anti-fascism. Normally, when we think of anti-anti-fascism, we think of fascism opposed to anti-fascists. But the left communist opposition to anti-fascism is not fascist, but rather a recognition that an anti-fascist alliance with the bourgeoisie leads to counterrevolution, as what happened in the Spanish Revolution.

Below are some excerpts from the essay.

Power does not come any more from the barrel of a gun than it comes from a ballot box. No revolution is peaceful, but its “military” dimension is never central. The question is not whether the proles finally decide to break into the armouries, but whether they unleash what they are: commodified beings who no longer can and no longer want to exist as commodities, and whose revolt explodes capitalist logic. Barricades and machine guns flow from this “weapon”. The greater the change in social life, the less guns will be needed, and the less casualties there will be. A communist revolution will never resemble a slaughter: not from any nonviolent principle, but because revolution subverts more (soldiers included) than it actually destroys.

To imagine a proletarian front facing off a bourgeois front is to conceive the proletariat in bourgeois terms, on the model of a political revolution or a war (seizing someone’s power, occupying their territory). In so doing, one reintroduces everything that the insurrectionary movement had overwhelmed: hierarchy, a respect for specialists, for knowledge that Knows, and for techniques to solve problems — in short for everything that plays down the role of the common man. In Spain, from the fall of 1936 onward, the revolution dissolved into the war effort and into a kind of combat typical of states: a war of fronts. Soon the working-class “militia man” evolved into a “soldier”.

Formed into “columns”, workers left Barcelona to defeat the fascists in other cities, starting from Zaragoza. Taking the revolution beyond areas under Republican control, however, would have meant completing the revolution in the Republican areas as well. But even Durruti did not seem to realise that the state was everywhere still intact. As his column (70% of whose members were anarchists) advanced, it extended the collectivisations: the militias helped the peasants and spread revolutionary ideas. Yet however much Durruti declared that “these militias will never defend the bourgeoisie” they did not attack it either.

Please don't downvote this because this is a bad opinion.

Of course it's a bad opinion. I'm sharing this here because I want to talk about it being a bad opinion.

Why is it a bad opinion?

I actually agree with the basic premise but reject the conclusion. I agree that 100% renewable energy cannot bring about energy security in the context of endless growth, but I reject the conclusion that therefore we need to keep burning fossil fuels. The solution, I think, is for degrowth, a coordinated scaling down of production of worthless things while at the same time scaling up provisions of human well being. Make more homes, less golf courses. Make more vegetables and grains for human consumption rather than animal feed. Fund hospitals, not wars. If we scale back production while at the same time meeting a high level of human needs, 100% renewable energy will certainly be enough for human needs. 100% renewable energy will never be enough for capitalist endless growth, but it will be enough for a solarpunk future.

According to a complaint filed with the UK government by human rights and environmental advocates this week, Standard Chartered violated international guidelines for responsible business conduct by co-financing four coal-fired power plants that have devastated local communities in the Philippines.

The complaint was filed with the UK National Contact Point for Responsible Business Conduct, a government office tasked with investigating breaches of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises.

Local communities have reported increased respiratory and skin disease, land dispossession, eviction and impoverishment directly resulting from the construction of the power plants.

The affected communities and NGOs are calling on Standard Chartered to contribute to the remediation process and strengthen its policy on remediation.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, as it is known in China and by Maoists worldwide, was initiated by Mao as a way of both empowering the Chinese working class and a way to rebuild his support base to combat factions within the CPC he did not like.

Yet Mao “is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells” and the Cultural Revolution escaped Mao's control. Multiple factions, though still speaking in Mao's name, sharply developed an analysis of rot in China's bureaucratic mode of development. Mao was both the initiator and ultimate gravedigger of the Cultural Revolution as he directed the People's Libreration Army to crush the ultraleft factions that precisely could have revolutionized China.

As Yiching Wu noted in The Cultural Revolution at the Margins, the defeat of the Cultural Revolution directly led to the defeat of the working class at Tiananmen Square and its resulting capitalist restoration in China.

Below is an excerpt from the manifesto of the Hunan Provincial Proletarian Revolutionary Committee that called for a “People's Commune of China.” They were crushed and the author of the manifesto jailed for a decade.

The storm of the January revolution was a great attempt by the revolutionary people, led by Chairman Mao, to topple the old world and build a new world. A program for the first Great Proletarian Political Revolution was formulated at that great moment. Chairman Mao pointed out: “This is one class overthrowing another. It is a great revolution.” That shows that the Cultural Revolution is not a revolution to dismiss officials from their office or a “dragging out” movement, nor is it a purely cultural revolution, but a revolution in which one class overthrows another.” Seen from the facts of the storm of the January revolution, the overthrown class is none other than the class of bureaucrats formed in China in the past 17 years. (Chairman Mao’s “Comment and Instructions on Li Cheng-jen’s On-the-Spot-Squatting Report,” January 25, 1965.)

In the struggle to seize power in these units, the Marxist principle of smashing the old state machinery must be observed. Here there is no place for reformism, combining two into one, or peaceful transition. The old state machinery must be smashed utterly. “The old system of exploitation, revisionist system, and bureaucratic organs must be utterly smashed.” The program of the first Great Proletarian Political Revolution was put forward in editorials in an embryonic, not very concrete state in the final stages of the storm of the January revolution. The decaying class that should be overthrown, the old state machinery that should be smashed, and even social problems, in which people formerly had not dared to express a dissident view, were put forward. This great development was an inevitable result of the courage and pioneering spirit demonstrated by the proletariat in the storm of the January revolution.

[…]

There are two essential points in the writings about the army:

1. It is now seen that the army now is different from the people’s army before the liberation. Before the liberation, the army and the people fought together to overthrow imperialism, bureaucratic capitalism, and feudalism. The relation between the army and the people was like that between fish and water. After the liberation, as the target of revolution has changed from imperialism, bureaucratic capitalism, and feudalism to capitalist-roaders, and these capitalist-roaders are power holders in the army, some of the armed forces in the revolution have not only changed their blood-and-flesh relations with the people that obtained before the liberation, but have even become tools for suppressing revolution. Therefore, if the first Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is to succeed, a radical change in the army will be necessary. The “ultra Left faction” has found the basis for its thinking in a quotation from Chairman Mao. In the same year after Chairman Mao issued the order for the armed forces to live in their barracks, (they are separated from the masses.

2. It is now seen that a revolutionary war in the country is necessary if the revolutionary people today want to overcome the armed Red capitalist class. The large-scale armed struggle between the proletariat and the Red capitalist class in August and the local revolutionary war in the country bore out the rebel factions’ prediction in August (sic). The experience created by the local revolutionary wars in August is moreover unparalleled in history and rich and great. Contrary to the expectations of the mediocrities in general, history advanced in the direction predicted by the “heretics and evil advocates.” Hitherto unimaginable, large-scale gun-seizing incidents occurred regularly in accordance with the pace of historical development. Local wars in the country of varying magnitude, in which the army took a direct part (in Kiangsi and Hangchow the armed forces were directly involved in the fighting), erupted. The creative spirit and revolutionary fervor displayed by the people in August was very moving. Gun-seizing became a “movement.” Its magnitude and the violence of the revolutionary wars gave the people a deep impression at the time. “The people, and the people alone, are the motive force of the creation of world history.” [Emphasis added.]

[…]

As a result of the practice of struggle having gained rich experience and entered a higher stage, the maturity of the political thinking of the revolutionary people in China has also entered a higher stage. A new trend of thought (called “ultra-Left trend of thought” by the enemy), including “overthrow of the new bureaucratic bourgeoisie,” “abolition of bureaucratic organs,” “thorough smashing of the state machine,” etc. wanders among the revolutionary people like a “spectre” in the eyes of the enemy. The weapon of political thinking with which the revolutionary masses are to win utter victory in the proletarian socialist great revolution has begun to appear in a new form in the “ultra-Left faction.” The thought of Mao Tse tung, which is carrying out a new social revolution in China, will gradually wake up the masses from all contradictions of the past. The revolutionary people are beginning to understand gradually in practice why revolution is necessary, who are to be liquidated in the revolution, and how revolution is to be carried out. Revolutionary struggle begins to change from the stage of spontaneity to that of consciousness, from necessity to freedom.

[…]

The commune of the “ultra-Left faction” will not conceal its viewpoints and intentions. We publicly declare that our object of establishing the “People’s Commune of China” can be attained only by overthrowing the bourgeois dictatorship and revisionist system of the revolutionary committee with brute force. Let the new bureaucratic bourgeoisie tremble before the true socialist revolution that shakes the world! What the proletariat can lose in this revolution is only their chains, what they gain will be the whole world!

Closer to home, desperation even might push us to "envision real utopias" in any marginal glimmer of communality: the noble Wikipedia editor, the worker cooperative competing on the global market, the sharing of food at the protest camp, the persistence of the public library despite the endless assault of privatization, the urban garden tended by the six-figure NGO executive, the sharing of cigarettes near the dumpsters behind the kitchen, or simply the commonplace care work that knits us to family and friends. To imagine that such things are somehow the germ of communism would be a joke if it was not so tragic. Like someone who believes that the window projected onto the wall is the real thing. The bleak reality is that none of us have ever seen even the dimmest glimmer of a communist world—at most we have witnessed a few of those weightless moments when many people realize at once that our world can, in fact, be broken. Ultimately, these are nothing but glowing images best seen from a distance. Reach out to touch them and there is no depth. Just work, survival, desperation. Just the drywall, off-white.

[…]

Below, we therefore offer a practical fiction rooted in a negative critique. Throughout, we will counterpose our account to what we think are common errors that plague the political imaginary while emphasizing the inherent unknowability and dynamic cultural efflorescence of a communist world. While the contrast between practical fiction and negative critique may seem paradoxical—an anti-utopian utopia—such a procedure is the nature of scientific inquiry. As in any scientific inquiry, the models that we pose here are ultimately makeshift. But, without any ability to directly observe or experiment, a certain degree of fictive rigor is essential in their construction. Imagination must be subject to at least a minimum level of real constraints. Among these are the "social forces" and "political, class forces" that have been produced by the course of history, which Lenin emphasizes. In addition, we stress here the equally prominent role of "productive forces" as concrete sites of social power, irreducible to their technical characteristics. In fact, we would argue that the failure of nearly every utopian vision on offer today manifests most strongly in their treatment of the question of production, which is either ignored entirely, presumed to be a purely technical-ecological matter best left to the experts, or viewed as so thoroughly subordinated to capitalist logics that prevailing agricultural and industrial practices must be uniformly and fundamentally replaced—with what, exactly, it is rarely clear, though gestures are often made in the direction of local autarky. Questions of locality and the precise process of production will therefore serve as lenses bringing focus to our own anti-utopian utopia or, more simply, our contribution to the science fiction of communism.

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)