Pétroleuse Press

"In this process of class struggle, which leads to the abolition of classes, individuals were ipso facto posed as being beyond gender, since they established a community of immediately social individuals.

This second part of the text tries to explain this ‘ipso facto’. This overcoming perceived as naturally included ‘in the movement’—as something that goes without saying, due to the nature and content of the movement—should be subjected as such to critique. It is not sufficient to say that communisation, being communisation, is by definition the overcoming of genders. Although distinct ‘fronts’ within the struggle cannot possibly exist, no key-element of class society will be overcome without being attacked for itself."

"Nothing unified & revolutionary will be formed until each section of the exploited will have made its own autonomous power felt." 

Don Juan was a choir boy compared to today’s hipsters.

"Let’s not talk about desires anymore, let’s desire: we are desiring machines, machines of war."

CONTENTS

I. Adrift through the circuits of feminized precarious work

II. Close encounters in the second phase: The communication continuum: care-sex-attention 

III. First Stutterings...

IV. A Very Careful Strike: Four Hypotheses

V. Bodies, lies, and video tape: between the logic of security and the logic of care

VI. Precarias Lexicon

Marx’s analysis of commodities as the elementary form of capitalist wealth can thus be understood as an interpretation of the status of woman in so-called partriarchal societies. The organization of such societies, and the operation of the symbolic system on which this organization is based—a symbolic system whose instrument and representative is the proper name: the name of the father, the name of God—contain in a nuclear form the developments that Marx defines as characteristic of a capitalist regime: the submission of “nature” to a “labor” on the part of men who thus constitute “nature” as use value and exchange value; the division of labor among private producer- owners who exchange their women-commodities among themselves, but also among producers and exploiters or exploitees of the social order; the standardization of women according to proper names that determine their equivalences; a tendency to accumulate wealth, that is, a tendency for the representatives of the most “proper” names—the leaders—to capitalize more women than the others; a progression of the social work of the symbolic toward greater and greater abstraction; and so forth.

The “other” homosexual relations, masculine ones, are just as subversive, so they too are forbidden. Because they openly interpret the law according to which society operates, they threaten in fact to shift the horizon of that law. Besides, they challenge the nature, status, and “exogamic” necessity of the product of exchange. By short-circuiting the mechanisms of commerce, might they also expose what is really at stake? Furthermore, they might lower the sublime value of the standard, the yard  stick. Once the penis itself becomes merely a means to pleasure, pleasure among men, the phallus loses its power. Sexual pleasure, we are told, is best left to those creatures who are ill-suited for the seriousness of symbolic rules, namely, women.

Exchanges and relationships, always among men, would thus be both required and forbidden by law. There is a price to pay for being the agents ofexchange: male subjects have to give up the possibility of serving as commodities themselves.

Everyone knows the terrible communities, having spent time in them or being within them still because they are always stronger than the others. And because of that one always stays, in part – and parts at the same time. Family, school, work, and prison are the classic faces of this form of contemporary hell. But they are less interesting as they belong to an old form of market evolution and only presently survive. On the contrary, there are the terrible communities which struggle against the existing state of things that are at one and the same time attractive and better than “this world.” And at the same time their way of being closer to the truth - and therefore to joy – moves them away from freedom more than anything else.

The question we must answer in a final manner is of a more ethical than political nature because the classic political forms and their categories fit us like our childhood clothing. The question is to know if we prefer the possibility of an unknown danger to the certainty of a present pain. That is to say if we want to continue to live and speak in agreement (dissident perhaps, but always in agreement) with what has been done so far – and thus with the terrible communities – or, if we want to question that small portion of our desire that the culture has not already infested in its mess, to try – in the name of an original happiness – a different path.

This text was conceived as a contribution to that other voyage.