Fun With Autonomy

ourcatastrophe:

besttumblr:

…The creepiest thing about violent revolutionary dialogue is that it feels apocalyptic in the Biblical sense; that everyone likes to pray for the revolution; that folks don’t like to consider who has the most power in physical/violent uprisings (hint: it’s the strongest, not the best or the smartest or the least-oppressive);

I think I disagree with this hint. In War it is the strongest who have the most power. But in uprisings, be they violent or non violent, power is primarily discursive. The power of these rebellions is not to challenge the millitary-state-thingy but to produce discursive intervention against police, poverty, austerity, or whatever it gets interpreted as.

one of these days I will have to write a longer thing about apocalypticism and the radical anti-capitalist left, and why I don’t trust “capitalism will eat itself” type revolutionary discourse

people have been saying that capitalism is on the verge of collapse for as long as capitalism has existed, just like people have been talking about “end times” or something like that for, as far as we can tell, forever

it just seems very naive and ahistorical and actually kind of lazy to me

Cant wait to read what you have to say about apocaylticism and leftie-types

Maybe there is something about how leftie-types imagine themselves as being outside ‘capitalism’ … that is leftie-types organise (or pray) from outside while ‘the oppressed masses’ riot from the inside. I think that kind of imagined seperation was evident in the original post. Like, by imagining that uprisings form part of the ‘capitalism will eat itself’ apocalypse prayer, are ‘the masses’ being imagined as actors without agency or the ability to organise? Why are the london riots being characterized (even fetishised?) by both critics and supporters as spontaneous and un-organised reactions to capitalist-police oppression? While the ‘spanish revolution’ was imagined as organised, political, rational etc?

Urgh, I am confused, there are too many dichotomies here… hurting my head.

All these rebellions (which i believe demonstrate rather than negate peoples agency) over the last two years combined with the inevitable-crisis-in-capital are producing changes in capitalism: for better or worse who knows?

Anyway, apocalypse without vampires… boring.

(Source: cordjefferson)