Why Hello There

A clear and much-debated example of [the position that "the cumulative function of [everyday forms of resistance] in reproducing a structure of domination, providing a kind of safety valve"] is Eugene Genovese's discussion of slave revlt and resistance in Roll Jordan roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1976). Saidiya Hartman has articulated a radical alternative to Genovese's framework, informed by Scott's notion of the 'infrapolitics of the dominated', and centred on a conception of the 'practice' of the enslaved defined, inter alia, by 'the non-autonomy of the field of action; provisional ways of operating within the dominant space; local, multiple, and dispersed sites of resistance that have not been strategically codified or integrated; and the anomalous condition of the slave as person and property.'

Much of the ordinary politics of subordinate groups historically has been a politics of dissimulation in which both the symbols and practices of resistance have been veiled. In place of the open insult, the use of gossips, nicknames, and character assassination; in place of direct physical assault, the use of sabotage, arson, and nocturnal threats by masked men (e.g. Captain Swing, the Rebecca Riots, Les Demoiselles); in place of labor defiance, shirking, slowdowns, and spoilage; in place of the tax riot or rebellion, evasion and concealment.

After the [American Civil] war, an abolitionist-labor alliance found organizational expression briefly under Marxist auspices. Former abolitionists, Chartists, Owenites, utopian socialists, followers of Proudhon, labor, and 'free love' advocates like [Stephen Pearl] Andrews and Victoria Woodhull joined the First International, begun with Marx's formation of the IWA in 1864 in London. Despite Marx's criticism of utopian socialism in contrast to his own brand of allegedly scientific socialism, many of these reformers were the first converts to Marxism. Abolitionists such as Richard Hinton, a follower of John Brown who led a black regiment during the Civil War, and William West, who had brought up the plight of wage slaves in the pages of the Liberator before the war, were prominent in the First International, which earned the support of [Charles] Sumner and [Wendell] Phillips. Andrews translated and Woodhull published Marx's Communist Manifesto (1848) in the United States for the first time in her newspaper, Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly [...] After the suppression of the [Paris] commune, the IWA, now headquartered in New York, held a huge demonstration in sympathy that included an all-black Skidmore guard named after Thomas Skidmore.

in which forms (and not only in the nation-form) must a socialist social formation exist so that the communist mode of production, which exists in an antagonistic fashion within that social formation (Lenin) with the capitalist mode of production (Lenin), has real chances of existing, that is to say of triumphing over the elements of the capitalist mode of production that subsist, all the while preparing in advance the forms of existence of this communist mode of production?

[The] red and green abolitionist internationalism [articulated by Ruth Wilson Gilmore], which is also to say a communism for an age of disaster capitalism, will perforce also have to confront the vexed issue of what is to be done with the vast socio-technical and energetic ensembles that have long made capital into a climatic, ecological and geological agent. If communism may also be understood, in Jacques Camatte's evocative formulation, as 'the resurrection of dead labour', how much of that dead labour will need to be 'left in the ground' or disactivated, along with all the supervisory and political functions that permit its reproduction and amortization? How can we prise apart the communist use values of the machinery integral to and form-determined by capital from the place of that machinery in the valorization process? And what does this mean now that the meaning of machinery must be stretched to include algorithms, logistical communication systems, and the whole material framework of our social relations? Whether we are evaluating the potentials for reconfiguring or refunctioning capitalist infrastructures in a communist horizon, or delineating the urgency of an 'ecological war communism' in a warming, pandemic world, these are practical and theoretical questions that any real move to abolish the present state of things cannot avoid.

The nexus of anti-slavery abolitionism and the international workers' movements, of the abolition of racial domination and the abolition of capital, has made itself felt at various junctures, often involving a creative appropriation of mainstream communist discourse and dogma for Black peoples' liberation projects. In 1930s Alabama, African American sharecroppers could mobilize the Communist Party as a vehicle for self-organization. This even included a militant translation of its otherwise worst phase, that of Third Period sectarianism, appropriating the Stalinist rhetoric of a 'new world' through Black traditions that 'emphasized both a struggle for survival and the transcendent hope of deliverance.' In the domain of culture, the spiritual 'Give Me That Old Time Religion', was adapted, with the new ending 'It was good enough for Lenin, and it's good enough for me.' As Aime Cesaire wrote in his 1956 letter to Maurice Thorez, bidding farewell to the French Communist Party: 'what I want is that Marxism and communism be placed in the services of black peoples, and not black peoples in the service of Marxism and communism' – a sentiment that could well be echoed by other subjects, in other domains.

Gooning is the eroticism of apathetic, animalistic distraction. The gooner dehumanizes themselves and their objects of affections at once. They deny themselves climax in pursuit of a greater reward - pleasure without end, alone. I think that sounds like a fun way to jerk off sometimes! But I worry about why, exactly, it is the only filth not actively antagonized at the sexual bedrock of modern America. I think it is easy to see ourselves at a remove from this broader tendency. It is easy to claim that this is just some incel shit, that this is the purview of the Male Loneliness Epidemic and other such manufactured distortions. Yet here we are, all of us perpetually gooned out. We live in a crass, lurid world that feigns purity. We are buried beneath omnidirectional content mills. Every conversation about “hating our phones” just makes them more alluring. AI age verification, a direct result of censorship in the surveillance state under the guise of protecting children, has begun rolling out in the UK and US; this obvious breach of privacy is leveraging a universal reliance on a centralized internet ecosystem. Television shows and podcasts are ever-present background noise and conversation to supplant being out in public. We embrace ahistorical marketing, sift enthusiastically through the conservative dog whistles, become just as entrenched in the proxy debates as those we oppose. We broadcast our opinions for LLMs to scrape and regurgitate back to us. We are obsessed with the stasis and passivity of an increasingly vile world. We are all, in our own way, awash in ambient, exhausting pleasure. Gooning is the thrill of tricking your brain into believing you are truly helpless, instead of just complacent. In so doing, we succumb to a real urge to dehumanize and isolate. We all seek some justification for our own distraction. We gorge ourselves in images of atrocity to the point of overstimulation, lying to ourselves that enough mournful reposts might eventually “count” as real action. We want discourse to feel politically productive, to relitigate Tumblr conversations as if that alone could reconfigure our present moment, to talk about the importance of good critical thinking. We are in a state of perpetual self-soothing, a crutch that directly inhibits community care.

Been reading Toscano’s keywords book this summer, and his entry on transition brought to mind his back-and-forth with Clover in Viewpoint Magazine from almost a decade ago. The following (from the latter) strikes me as damningly apt, a (still pitch-perfect) distillation of the tenor and stakes of Toscano’s work — and its limits:

The timing of the June 14 “No Kings” event was therefore fortuitous for Bass, Newsom, and the Democratic Party in California, for whom it amounted to a “peaceful” show of force, and a rebuke of the Trump administration’s challenging of their control over the city through the dispatch of military troops. Ideologically, the march was focused on the broader authoritarian drift of the administration, and it was pointedly well-behaved, backstopping the mayor’s and governor’s claim that no federal intervention was needed, and amounted to a power play meant to humiliate Trump’s political opponents. Though the chant “ICE out of LA!” surfaced repeatedly throughout the demonstration, the event was colored by this standoff between local and federal authorities, and participants were not wrong to feel as though they had been conscripted into a kind of political theater, cast in the role of responsible protestor. Indeed, the protests of June 14 might, in hindsight, be read as a counter-demonstration against the much more combative exchanges set off by the raids of June 6th and 7th, a rebuke as much to the militant response to the ICE raids as to the federal government’s bullying and lawlessness. Democratic politicians were eager to rewrite the conflict as one between federal and state authorities, to be adjudicated in the courts and then in elections, rather than between resident workers—and those willing to defend them—and groups of masked men attempting to arrest and deport them.

The conflict between state and federal authorities, and that between the largely docile protests sponsored by progressive organizations and the desperate fight to prevent the abduction of Los Angeles residents by masked men in vans, were not the only tensions structuring the events of the second week of June. In a bizarre twist that only the shambolic Trump could script, the president announced on June 12 that the agriculture and hospitality industries were losing “very good, long time workers … with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” as a result of ICE’s campaign; shortly after, senior ICE officials placed an immediate hold “on all work site enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels.” That certain employers were finding it impossible to carry out their operations as a result of these actions surprised no one, save Trump himself.

Turned on their head, the strengths of the best journalistic criticism — rhetorical dynamism, crisp prose, topical voracity, casual erudition — reveal exactly its faults: overheated rhetoric, stylistic preciosity, patchy dilettantism, flimsy citation. (In Kramnick’s diplomatic formulation, public “debate” lacks “the archival persistence and citational evolution of scholarly argument.”) In turn, the monochrome prose, tunnel-vision specialism, and citational exhaustion of academic criticism might only be the underside of sobriety, rigor, and expertise.

A customary joke among grad students is that this or that rich private university is really a hedge fund or real estate developer that happens to run a university. (Columbia and NYU, the two largest private landowners in New York City, pay almost no property taxes on their multibillion-dollar portfolios.) More true than not, this line nevertheless misses some of the strangeness of the university as a hybrid institution with competing, confused functions: any actual asset manager would have long ago bulldozed the literature departments and thrown up a mid-market condo complex called The Novel. Yet literature continues to be studied, taught, and even written there, and while the returns have dwindled to nearly nothing, cultural capital — as detailed in Guillory’s landmark 1993 book of that title — still accrues to the transmission of literary knowledge. With entire language departments in fiscal and existential jeopardy at public universities and small colleges, the darkest prospect for literary studies is not its wholesale dissolution, but its residual subsidy as a loss leader for a few elite schools that can afford it. Facing such decimation, you might think criticism’s tenured guardians would at last look to press on their own institutional leverage points. You’d be wrong. Last October, in a belated sequel to its refusal to join the boycott of South African apartheid in the 1980s, the Executive Council of the discipline’s crumbling main pillar, the Modern Language Association, blocked a resolution to endorse the BDS movement and denounce Israeli scholasticide in Gaza. The stated reasoning was at least refreshingly materialist: backlash to the resolution would have lost the MLA too much money. “We acknowledge that phrases such as ‘fiduciary review’ and conversations about revenue can sound callous in the face of atrocity,” the council members wrote near the end of a long, anguished statement. Close readers to the end.