sharpened edges

One can already see moments when the circulation struggle and the reproduction struggle are hard to distinguish – I think for example of the ZAD in France (zone à defendre), No TAV in the SUSA valley, habitations designed explicitly to interfere with paradigmatic sites of circulation, airports and train lines, not just while but by reproducing themselves socially. The NoDAPL movement at Standing Rock or Tar Sands in Canada provide clarifying examples in the ways that these confrontations so evidently derive from the entanglement of absorptive and colonial modes, and give versions of what I am trying to think about: pipeline blockades that were also for a time self-reproducing communities necessary to preserve the blockade. Circulation struggle and reproduction struggle. Encampment as confrontation, confrontation as encampment. Care work as barricade, barricade as care work. I do not think that any of these, yet, has perfected some synthesis. But they are not charged with perfection. They have clarified the form and in what conditions it arises. One can develop clean models in scholarship; life is always provisional. It seems most important to affirm the simultaneity of these forms of social contest in the present, to affirm their coexistence within the heterogeneous and ambiguous course of capitalist and social development. […] The name I would give to the form of struggle which lies beyond both wage and market dependency can only be commune.

One sees in the worlds detailed by Marx and Fanon distinct solutions to Cesaire’s two problems of the proletariat in the metropole and the excluded in the colony, two forms of potential surplus. One solution is economic expansion, the capacity to take that potential surplus population into the circuits of accumulation, the thematic that Lukacs in discussing the eighteenth and nineteenth century novel names as “reconciliation.” This is the regime that I am calling absorption. The other is open and immanent violence directed against those for whom every doorway is labeled NO ENTRY, a cruel ironic circumstance in that they are trapped in a colonial world itself forever labeled NO EXIT. This is the regime I am calling coloniality. The opposition should not be exaggerated. Both absorption and coloniality feature racialized domination and the regulatory compulsions of value production. There is wage work in the colonial scene, and slavery in the industrializing core. […] There may nonetheless be a certain yield to drawing the distinction, to noting the differing orientations of these two regimes. While the former features and arguably depends on racialized exclusion, on moments of internal colonization, this is subordinated to capital’s self-expansion and intensification at the scale of national economy. While the latter is subject to the constraints of global capitalist relations, it is not an absorptive capitalism, at least not absorptive enough to challenge what Fanon insists is the historical speciation which divides colonizer and colonized. And it is from within these two regimes, absorption and coloniality, that the lumpen appear differently: here as counterrevolutionary dregs, here as revolutionary edge. But the further thing to note, and perhaps this is obvious, is that the distance between these two regimes is closing. This convergence was predicted in the nineteenth century – but it is not happening in the way expected. Rather than colonial regimes moving toward absorptive capitalism, the great promise of “development,” the reduction of all life to the homogeneity of “simple labor” where every proletarian is an exchangeable unskilled laborer, development has meant that the high-wage nations are losing their capacity to absorb. Surveying the technological development of Detroit, the consequences of automation, auto worker and theorist James Boggs noted in 1963, “Today in the United States there is no doubt that those at the bottom are growing in numbers much faster than the system will ever be able to absorb. America is headed toward full unemployment, not full employment”. I think this account of development and its transformations throws human beings onto the dystopian shores of the present. These nations where the regime of absorption has run up against historical limits are, one might say, recolonizing; at a minimum, as surplus populations increase and wage discipline contracts, these nations develop modes of domestic securitization premised on direct domination, most visibly in the policing and hyperincarceration of subordinated populations. […] One sees the consequences of this coloniality of the wage in every favela and at every border, as nations that once promised to absorb every labor input – this is the explicit promise inscribed on the Statue of Liberty in New York’s harbor, given a poetic flourish – now devote all the powers of state violence and of law (a formal distinction at best) to limit immigration. When xenophobia and labor regimes are in alignment it is a dangerous time indeed; fascism is one politicization of this conjuncture. At the same time it is also the character of this historical moment, the moment that absorption is exhausted, that the lumpen, those excluded from the wage – consistently along racialized lines – take on the political significance seen by Fanon.

Without the railroads there would be no Canada as we know it. Rail infrastructure literally, materially made the settler state possible. Railroads consolidated a vast set of Indigenous territories into the jurisdiction of a single settler state, and was a condition for disparate British colonies to sign the Constitution. But in a seemingly circular move, the rail infrastructure that underpinned the Canadian Constitution also relied upon the Canadian state’s proclaimed jurisdiction in the Constitution in order to be built. The rail was sanctioned by the Constitution and the Constitution was sanctioned by the rail. The railroad engineered genocide. Rail enabled and rationalized the clearing of the plains and so too the mass starvation of plains peoples. Through deliberate destruction of vast continental herds of 60 million buffalos, transcontinental railroads underpinned the destruction of entire ecologies. The railroad became the key infrastructure in the colonial war against first people as it transported Canadian militia forces to the front lines of colonial wars against Cree and Metis people. The railroads were also bound up in complex racialized labor regimes that particularly impacted Chinese and Black workers. The rail carried white passengers into intimate fantasies of racial subservience and it carried racialized workers to premature deaths. For these and many more reasons, rail networks are so deeply bound up with Canadian settler colonialism, making them an ideal target for anti-colonial action.

Freud tells us that mourning is the reaction not only to the death of a loved person, but also “to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as fatherland, liberty, an ideal …” Can we be allowed to include, in this “civilized” list, the ideal of perverse sexual pleasure itself rather than one stemming from its sublimation? Alongside the dismal toll of death, what many of us have lost is a culture of sexual possibility: back rooms, tea rooms, bookstores, movie houses, and baths; the trucks, the pier, the ramble, the dunes. Sex was everywhere for us, and everything we wanted to venture: golden showers and water sports, cocksucking and rimming, fucking and fist fucking. Now our untamed impulses are either proscribed once again or shielded from us by latex.

[D]uring the AIDS crisis there is an all but inevitable connection between the memories and hopes associated with our lost friends and the daily assaults on our consciousness. Seldom has a society so savaged people during their hour of loss. “We look upon any interference with [mourning] as inadvisable or even harmful,” warns Freud. But for anyone living daily with the AIDS crisis, ruthless interference with our bereavement is as ordinary an occurrence as reading the New York Times. The violence we encounter is relentless, the violence of silence and omission almost as impossible to endure as the violence of unleashed hatred and outright murder. Because this violence also desecrates the memories of our dead, we rise in anger to vindicate them. For many of us, mourning becomes militancy.

Probably no gay man or lesbian can have an untroubled response to Freud, but we must nevertheless take care to maintain a crucial distinction: the ambition to normalize, to adapt, belongs not to Freud but to his later “egocentric” revisionists, to whom gay people owe a good portion of our oppression. This is not to say that there is no vision of normalcy in Freud, only that there is also no such thing as ever fully achieving it, for anyone.

[Gerrard] Winstanley used Scripture language, but gave his own sense to the biblical stories. The Crucifixion, the Resurrection and the Ascension may or may not have been historical events (‘it matters not much’): they are more important as metaphors for psychological transformations within men and women. The Christ who lived at Jerusalem is less significant for us than the Christ within. The establishment of private property had been the Fall of Man: its abolition, together with that of wage labour, would allow a return to the innocence of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Winstanley’s God is not to be found above the skies after we are dead, but within each of us, here on earth. There is no heaven or hell after death, no personal immortality. Heaven, hell, Satan, are all within us. The universe—as Milton thought too—had been created out of the substance of God. The Second Coming of Jesus Christ is the rising of Reason within sons and daughters, and Reason means awareness of the need for co-operation. Winstanley uses the word Reason in preference to God. As Christ rises, so all men and women will come to see the necessity of co-operation. There is no other Second Coming. Ultimately all mankind, without exception, will be saved—i.e. brought into the haven of peace and rest on earth—not by the descent of a Saviour from the clouds but by the rising of communal consciousness within them. All men shall become Sons of God united by the Christ within. Universalism was of course highly unorthodox when Winstanley began to preach it in 1648: in his final version it was hardly Christian at all. Winstanley saw the clergy as his main adversaries because they made a handsome living out of persuading the poor to accept their poverty on earth and look for their reward in heaven after death. The Diggers expected their heaven on earth. In Winstanley’s ideal commonwealth there would be no state church; preaching for hire (i.e. an endowed ministry) would be as illegal as buying and selling, or lawyers taking fees. Winstanley rejected all church ordinances—prayer, preaching, baptism, holy communion, Sabbath observance. What mattered was ‘the anointing’ by the spirit of God. Winstanley believed that ‘all the inward bondages of the mind’ are ‘occasioned by the outward bondage that one sort of people lay upon another’, and will disappear in an equal society.

The trap some historians have fallen into […] illustrates the dangers of the principle […] that in discussing seventeenth-century society we must not use terms of analysis which were then unknown. Words like ‘class’ and ‘revolution’ were not used then in their modern sense: ergo there cannot have been classes and revolutions. The gentry thought they were the ‘county community’: ergo we must perpetuate the illusion of a ‘one-class society’ in which only the gentry mattered. Contemporaries had no words to ‘conjoin … yeomen and master-craftsmen’; ergo .... But […] they had such a word—they called them ‘people’, a category from which servants and the poor were excluded. We are much more likely to be confused if we use terms like ‘county community’ and ‘people’ in their seventeenth-century sense than if, with proper definition, we use the terms of art devised by later political analysts. The word ‘revolution’ in fact acquired its modern meaning in the later seventeenth-century because of experience of what happened in the mid-century. The absence of the word does not prove that the thing could not have existed: the thing had to come first for men to find a word for it. How indeed could it have been otherwise?

One problem to be faced in dealing with seventeenth-century England, and particularly with radicals, is the censorship. It was there all the time before 1640, its strictness increasing in the 1630s. In the 1640s it was intermittent and rarely effective: it was gradually restored in the 1650s, though there was still greater freedom for radical voices to be heard than after 1660. […] [W]e must never forget its existence, and how exceptional men felt its brief absence to be. ‘I must speak plain to you,’ Gerrard Winstanley told Oliver Cromwell in 1651, ‘lest my spirit tell me another day, “if thou hadst spoke plain, things might have been amended.”’ Under censorship men restrained themselves from telling the whole truth as they saw it, proceeding by analogy, implication and innuendo. Milton quoted Bacon: ‘authorized books are but the language of the times.’ From Spenser to Bunyan those with something original to say found it safer to make use of allegory or pastoral; others cited the Bible or the classics to convey unorthodox views without actual commitment. ‘Of the maintenance of our Saviour and his Apostles,’ wrote Thomas Hobbes, a master of this art, ‘we read only that they had a purse (which was carried by Judas Iscariot)’. No one could fault that factual statement; but implications for current disputes about tithes could be drawn from it. […] Others equivocated by giving precise but unorthodox sense to biblical terms. Thus when Winstanley declared, ‘I do walk in the daily practice of such ordinances of God as Reason and Scriptures do warrant’, we have to remember that he believed Reason and Scriptures did not warrant prayer, preaching, holy communion, baptism or Sabbath observance. Winstanley tells us that ‘all the prophecies, visions and revelations of Scriptures, of prophets and apostles concerning the calling of the Jews, the restoration of Israel and making of that people the inheritors of the whole earth, doth all seat themselves in this work of making the earth a common treasury’ which the Diggers advocated. Everybody was agains Antichrist; so his name could be extended from Pope to bishops, to the whole hierarchy of the state church, to the King and royalists who defended them; similarly the Norman Yoke could be extended from obsolete laws which Parliament could reform to the whole body of the law itself, and to the Norman gentry and freeholders who opposed the digging on St. George’s Hill.

Peter Bamm, a German Army physician who served at the Russian front, tells in Die Unsichtbare Flagge (1952) of the killing of Jews in Sevastopol. They were collected by ‘the others,’ as he calls the S.S. mobile killing units, to distinguish them from ordinary soldiers, whose decency the book extols, and were put into a sealed-off part of the former G.P.U. prison that abutted on the officer’s lodgings, where Bamm’s own unit was quartered. They were then made to board a mobile gas van, in which they died after a few minutes, whereupon the driver transported the corpses outside the city and unloaded them into tank ditches. ‘We knew this. We did nothing. Anyone who had seriously protested or done anything against the killing unit would have been arrested within twenty-four hours and would have disappeared. It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian governments in our century that they don’t permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr’s death for their convictions. A good many of us might have accepted such a death. The totalitarian state lets its opponents disappear in silent anonymity. It is certain that anyone who had dared to suffer death rather than silently tolerate the crime would have sacrificed his life in vain. This is not to say that such a sacrifice would have been morally meaningless. It would only have been practically useless. None of us had a conviction so deeply rooted that we could have taken upon ourselves a practically useless sacrifice for the sake of a higher moral meaning.’ Needless to add, the writer remains unaware of the emptiness of his much emphasized ‘decency’ in the absence of what he calls a ‘higher moral meaning.’ […] [T]he argument […] at first sounds so hopelessly plausible. It is true that totalitarian domination tried to establish these holes of oblivion into which all deeds, good and evil, would disappear, but just as the Nazis’ feverish attempts, from June, 1942, on, to erase all traces of the massacres – through cremation, through burning in open pits, through the use of explosives and flame-throwers and bone-crushing machinery – were doomed to failure, so all efforts to let their opponents ‘disappear in silent anonymity’ were in vain. The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story. Hence, nothing can ever be ‘practically useless,’ at least, not in the long run.

[Eichmann’s] first deportation jobs did not belong to the Final Solution; they occurred before the official Hitler order. In view of what happened later, they can be regarded as test cases, as an experiment in catastrophe. The first was the deportation of thirteen hundred Jews from Stettin, which was carried out in a single night, on February 13, 1940. This was the first deportation of German Jews, and Heydrich had ordered it under the pretext that ‘their apartments were urgently required for reasons connected with the war economy.’ They were taken, under unusually atrocious conditions, to the Lublin area of Poland. The second deportation took place in the fall of the same year: all the Jews in Baden and the Saarpfalz – about seventy-five hundred men, women, and children – were shipped […] to Unoccupied France, which was at that moment quite a trick, since nothing in the Franco-German Armistice agreement stipulated that Vichy France could become a dumping ground for Jews. […] These two operations entirely lacked the later elaborate ‘legal’ preparations. No laws had yet been passed depriving Jews of their nationality the moment they were deported from the Reich, and instead of the many forms Jews eventually had to fill out in arranging for the confiscation of their property, the Stettin Jews simply signed a general waiver, covering everything they owned. Clearly, it was not the administrative apparatus that these first operations were supposed to test. The objective seems to have been a test of general political conditions – whether Jews could be made to walk to their doom on their own feet, carrying their own little valises, in the middle of the night, without any previous notification; what the reaction of their neighbors would be when they discovered the empty apartments in the morning; and, last but not least, in the case of the Jews from Baden, how a foreign government would react to being suddenly presented with thousands of Jewish ‘refugees.’ As far as the Nazis could see, everything turned out very satisfactorily. In Germany, there were a number of interventions for ‘special cases’ […] but the population at large obviously could not have cared less. […] In France, something even better happened: the Vichy government put all seventy-five hundred Jews from Baden in the notorious concentration camp at Gurs, at the foot of the Pyrenees, which had originally been built for the Spanish Republican Army and had been used since May of 1940 for the so-called ‘réfugiés provanent d’Allemagne,’ the large majority of whom were, of course, Jewish. (When the Final Solution was put into effect in France, the inmates of the Gurs camp were all shipped to Auschwitz.) The Nazis, always eager to generalize, thought they had demonstrated that Jews were ‘undesirables’ everywhere and that every non-Jew was an actual or potential anti-Semite.

[T]he acceptance of privileged categories – German Jews as against Polish Jews, war veterans and decorated Jews as against ordinary Jews, families whose ancestors were German-born as against recently naturalized citizens, etc. – had been the beginning of the moral collapse of respectable Jewish society. (In view of the fact that today such matters are often treated as though there existed a law of human nature compelling everybody to lose his dignity in the face of disaster, we may recall the attitude of the French Jewish war veterans who were offered the same privileges by their government, and replied: ‘We solemnly declare that we renounce any exceptional benefits we may derive from our status as ex-servicemen’ [American Jewish Yearbook, 1945].) Needless to say, the Nazis themselves never took these distinctions seriously, for them a Jew was a Jew, but the categories played a certain role up to the very end, since they helped put to rest a certain uneasiness among the German population: only Polish Jews were deported, only people who had shirked military service, and so on. For those who did not want to close their eyes it must have been clear from the beginning that it ‘was a general practice to allow certain exceptions in order to be able to maintain the general rule all the more easily’ (in the words of Louis de Jong in an illuminating article on ‘Jews and Non-Jews in Nazi-Occupied Holland’).

We need mention here only in passing the so-called ‘inner emigration’ in Germany – those people who frequently held positions, even high ones, in the Third Reich and who, after the end of the war, told themselves and the world at large that they had always been ‘inwardly opposed’ to the regime. The question here is not whether or not they are telling the truth; the point is, rather, that no secret in the secret-ridden atmosphere of the Hitler regime was better kept than such ‘inward opposition.’ This was almost a matter of course under the conditions of Nazi terror; as a rather well-known ‘inner emigrant,’ who certainly believed in his own sincerity, once told me, they had to appear ‘outwardly’ even more like Nazis than ordinary Nazis did, in order to keep their secret. […] The sinister Dr Otto Bradfisch, former member of one of the Einsatzgruppen, who presided over the killing of at least fifteen thousand people, told a German court that he had always been ‘inwardly opposed’ to what he was doing. Perhaps the death of fifteen thousand people was necessary to provide him with an alibi in the eyes of ‘true Nazis.’ […] [N]umerous civil servants […] today assert that they stayed in their jobs for no other reason than to ‘mitigate’ matters and to prevent ‘real Nazis’ from taking over their posts. […] Dr Hans Globke, Undersecretary of State and from 1953 to 1963 chief of the personnel division in the West German Chancellery […] had been employed in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior before Hitler’s rise to power, and had shown there a rather premature interest in the Jewish question. He formulated the first of the directives in which ‘proof of Aryan descent’ was demanded, in this case of persons who applied for permission to change their names. This circular letter of December, 1932 – issued at a time when Hitler’s rise to power was not yet a certainty, but a strong probability – oddly anticipated the ‘top secret decrees,’ that is, the typically totalitarian rule by means of laws that are not brought to the attention of the public, which the Hitler regime introduced much later, in notifying the recipients that ‘these directives are not for publication.’ […] [S]ince it is true that his Commentary on the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 was considerably harsher than the earlier interpretation of Rassenschande by the Ministry of the Interior’s expert on Jewish affairs, Dr Bernhard Lösener, an old member of the Party, one could even accuse him of having made things worse than they were under ‘real Nazis.’ But even if we were to grant him all his good intentions, it is hard indeed to see what he could have done under the circumstances to make things better than they would otherwise have been. Recently, however, a German newspaper, after much searching, came up with an answer to this puzzling question. They found a document, duly signed by Dr Globke, which decreed that Czech brides of German soldiers had to furnish photographs of themselves in bathing suits in order to obtain a marriage license. And Dr Globke explained: ‘With this confidential ordinance a three-year-old scandal was somewhat mitigated’; for, until his intervention, Czech brides had to furnish snapshots that showed them stark naked.

To a Jew [the] role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story. It had been known about before, but now it has been exposed for the first time in all its pathetic and sordid detail by Raul Hilberg, [in his] standard work The Destruction of the European Jews […]. In the matter of cooperation, there was no distinction between the highly assimilated Jewish communities of Central and Western Europe and the Yiddish-speaking masses of the East. In Amsterdam as in Warsaw, in Berlin as in Budapest, Jewish officials could be trusted to compile the lists of persons and of their property, to secure money from the deportees to defray the expenses of their deportation and extermination, to keep track of vacated apartments, to supply police forces to help seize Jews and get them on trains, until, as a last gesture, they handed over the assets of the Jewish community in good order for final confiscation. They distributed the Yellow Star badges, and sometimes, as in Warsaw, ‘the sale of the armbands became a regular business; there were ordinary armbands of cloth and fancy plastic armbands which were washable.’ In the Nazi-inspired, but not Nazi-dictated, manifestoes they issued, we still can sense how they enjoyed their new power – ‘The Central Jewish Council has been granted the right of absolute disposal over all Jewish spiritual and material wealth and over all Jewish manpower,’ as the first announcement of the Budapest Council phrased it. We know how the Jewish officials felt when they became instruments of murder – like captains ‘whose ships were about to sink and who succeeded in bringing them safe to port by casting overboard a great part of their precious cargo’; like saviors who ‘with a hundred victims save a thousand people, with a thousand ten thousand.’ The truth was even more gruesome. Dr Kastner, in Hungary, for instance, saved exactly 1,684 people with approximately 476,000 victims.

It is ideologically convenient for those who wish to maintain the status quo to assume that anyone proposing to radically transform society must be out of tune with ‘‘reality’’; in fact, such an assumption merely unconsciously hypostasizes whatever conditions happen to be prevailing at the time—mere historical contingency—into ‘‘reality’’ per se, and therefore into natural necessity. The ruling ideologies that prevail in any dominatory social order […] surreptitiously substitute a ‘‘must be’’ for every ‘‘is,’’ and turn every ‘‘must be’’ into an ‘‘ought to be.’’ It is precisely this ideological slide from description to prescription that anarchist critics from Proudhon to [Peter Lamborn] Wilson have always called attention to, and it is in terms of this opposition that they have encountered works of radical ugliness as manifestations of a conservative aesthetic.

[Édouard] Glissant’s critique of transparency […] carries epistemological as well as existential connotations. It is about ways of reading as well ways of being. […] For Glissant the logic of transparency was often bound up with reductive practices of “understanding.” The French verb “comprendre” contains “prendre” (to take) as its root and this is suggestive of the extractive logics which often guide western-centric knowledge production, where alterity is frequently reduced to dominant frameworks of interpretation. This becomes more obvious in the often used synonym of “to grasp.” In these senses of understanding, Glissant saw “the movement of hands that grab their surroundings and bring them back to themselves. A gesture of enclosure if not appropriation.” [Glissant, Poetics of Relation, pp. 191–2] As an example of this critique’s ongoing relevance, think of the responses to the recent reemergence of Black Lives Matter where anti-racist reading lists were shared widely throughout social media as well as academic mailing lists. These reading lists varied but often contained familiar recurring authors whose works were compiled together irrespective of genre: novels, poetry, nonfiction essay, autobiographical writings by Black authors were all piled together. Despite good intentions, it was as if these works existed to fulfill a primary role for white audiences: to communicate a transparent and digestible anti-racist message. It is ironic that Toni Morrison’s novels were often included in these reading lists since she famously argued that “Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a rigorous art form.” Black culture repeatedly gets placed in the enclosure alluded to by Glissant, repeatedly put in pedagogical positions in which white audiences mine it for transparent messages rather than take its opacity seriously on its own terms.