Tuesday, 31st January, 2023, 4.49pm

Shorn of the Dead - an unfinished note on the failure of the Navvies', Bricklayers' Labourers' and General Labourers' Union, founded in the autumn of 1889, whilst also considering the heroic defence of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University of November 2019

The Navvies’ Union, founded towards the end of the era of great navigation projects, never organised more than a few thousand men (membership dropping from its 5000 peak to 1000 members in its first decade) when it had the potential to represent 2 million workers was always only a slightly more substantial than a paper union. There were spontaneous outbreaks amongst the navvies, unofficial strikes, direct action, arson, sabotage, riot, beatings, but the union itself, the model of unionisation, could not gain traction amongst a group of workers who, in a crisis of beforewardness, recapitulated all the critique’s of earlier forms of struggle - the critique of invariance, the critique of autonomy, the critique of self-organisation, the critique of the critique of work, the critique of identity, the critique of the mass worker, the critique of revindication  -  as described by /Théorie Communiste/ but /before/ their conditions, the history of struggles, have constrained them to do so. The Navvies’ practical critique of all later forms, in an uncanny avant garde manoeuvre of anticipation-prevention, before they have occurred, where this later communising form appears - /folded-back into/ à la Burroughs - in historical sequence /in advance/ of the earlier forms which are supposed to condition its possibility. The appearance of a historic form /sui generis/ and out of sequence perfectly defines the revolutionary manner by which a refusal of all relations and all conditions is imposed. The failure of the Navvies', Bricklayers' Labourers' and General Labourers' Union in 1891 to extend itself beyond paper status /is/ the communising tendency in action, the practical critique of everyday life applied directly by those who are historically structured by future events to have no interest in /combination/, /representation/, or /power/.

Exceptional social formations set certain problems for theoretical versions of the world which cannot adequately account for them without also jeopardising the theory itself. Then what was it about the navvies, as a body of workers, that caused them to take /The Russian Road/ out of collective bargaining and its historical developments, and thereby refuse the entire 20th century of proletarian subjectivity? Historically, objectively, it seems that communism only appears as an exit point at the threshold of proletarianisation... revolutionary consciousness is a contemporaneous product of those circumstances in which large numbers of pre-modern labourers and peasants are incorporated into the productive apparatus. Newly proletarianised populations have direct memories of other modes of living in the world - for such workers, /things otherwise/ is either an immediately realisable alternative, or a maddeningly close at hand but forbidden way out. By definition, the population of navvy labourers was not sedentary and, to its advantage, not necessarily literate - it became a moving cloud into which identities could disappear, individuals could not supply proof of who they were - and for these reasons, it was tamed more by attractors (capital investment, alcohol, camp conditions) than by the typical negative reinforcements applied to sedentary workers (eviction, debtors prison, workhouse, church morality). 

Even so, for all its avant garde spontaneity, the navvy camp was self-limiting, in time as well as in numbers of individuals. For all its improvisatory approach to living outside of the state, it could not expand and still less generalise its model - its way of life, remained at the level of a distinct group within a wider population. And, by the end of the century of great infrastructural works, the number of workers involved began to decline... as capital investment in railways declined, more workers were drawn into standardised factory employment. In other words, the navvies, as an island population within the wider proletariat, encountered the limit inherent to, and the problematic articulated by, self-organisation as this is described by Théorie Communiste. The self-organising entity achieves steady state through the situation of its core attractor within a /basin/ or island type terrain -  that which self-organises, by definition, is isolated (even if it is situated within a wider horizontal domain of similar circuits). A self-organising system only changes with the introduction/withdrawal of external inputs, and it only functions within a generalising environmental tendency via /phase locking/. It is the thesis of Théorie Communiste, that history phase locks communism to a generalised degenerative ratchet-type evolution in the forms of class struggle that in turn are constrained by the objective, and irreversible developmental  trajectory of the forces of production - communism appears as a possible outcome at the end of the sequence where all other options (self-organisation/autonomy etc) have been exhausted (have been confronted with their objective limits). As a general evolutionary/developmental theory, Théorie Communiste’s model of class struggle and the historical entry point for communism seems operationally inconsistent, or at least implausible. The strict determinist modelling by which certain forms appear as immediate expressions of environmental conditions simplifies complex processes to the point of falsification - in evolutionary terms, Théorie Communiste‘s version of history seems both neo-lamarckian and teleological. 

In practice, forms of class struggle develop autonomously but all at once, immediately co-existing in ever changing proportions for the entire span of the productive relation. All possible proletarian positions and modes of engagement are drawn from at every point from the entire history of the labour apparatus (including those from the history of the future). Everything, and everyone, is already here - why not consider Alan Moore’s proposal that all history is simultaneous, that time is a solid block? Whether one form of being, engaging, relating, metabolising is manifested as definitively occupying a certain juncture, it does not deny the prescience of every the other form, including all those forms that are impossible. Dominant forms do not arrive as if riding in a cart harnessed to the means of production (I want to say, ‘horses of instruction’). They appear chaotically within, and ‘in relation’ to, that particular moment’s conditions of possibility, but not strictly determined by the moment’s technological configuration. There are sudden and mysterious precipitations and convergences of form, where a particularity dominates absolutely its moment and yet the moment itself could easily support any number of other contingencies.       

   

A dominant form in mass society is a form that has entered a plague dimension - it is always irrational and always occupies a moment that is better suited to a more rational alternative. Hitchcock’s technical expertise lay precisely in orchestrating that circumstance where the possibility of plague dimensionality has become the lifeworld for outliers and first arrivers - something articulated by the SI, /gradually at first, then all at once./  Precipitant collapse into a particular form is more a matter of eroded circumstance than decisive agency.  Whether a bird flying down a chimney is about to catalyse a /The Birds/ type event, or is merely suggestive of a pattern of association, intimating the latency, of plague dimensions, has nothing to do with the activity of the bird itself. The potential success of any given form is not decided within the just-so composition, or fittedness. of the form - every form has always existed even if only in the far future or the distant past (eternity is real but it exists only in the very smallest of details). Autonomy and self-organisation may seem to compete against communising tendencies, and this may be presented in some ascent of man style narrative, but in reality the entire register of proletarian forms are held frozen in constellation by the general relations of production that constitute environmental conditions. That form which is permitted to advance at a particular moment (negatively allowed because of weakness of forces or positively encouraged to release new resources) only awakens, passing from a latent to a manifest state, has done nothing but occupy by accident a temporary niche that might just as easily be occupied by some other, perhaps some better suited other...  

Hong Kong: certain references and associations are almost unavoidable: /become like water in water/; /never occupy only vacate/; Benjamin’s burrowing (Arcades Project); Kafka’s burrowing; Freud’s perceptual shield; Thermopylae; prison occupations and /Zéro de conduite/ 

[I will never complete this attempted tunnel between the Hong Kong events and the Navvies encampment - but in not completing it, and not writing it, we discover miraculously, the tunnel is already dug!]

Saturday, 28/01/2023, 2.25pm

And yet, once again, it is nothing but Papa versus the autocephalous hydra

With China’s grudging suspension of its covid lockdown, and with its foot dragging but economically inevitable abandonment of the vulnerable sections of its populace, we are now able to make out a clear and measurable distinction between the speed efficiency of repressive and exploitative regimes of production. The exchange rate between capital’s two operating systems may be stated thus: approximately 2 years output within the emancipatory-exploitative umwelt are equivalent to 3 years output under the surplus reality of labouring sublimation. Biopower out-competes the Labour Republic in energy conservation at a rate of 2 to 3. At the level of cost, that is at the level of losses incurred by intrasystem friction and constraint, abstract emancipation is one third more efficient at sloughing off, one third more efficient at escaping from, the societal and the concrete. Thus, as a whirling within the whirling, it is that step closer to freeing itself from the hold of embodied labour over wealth production. 

Whether the discrepancy between the two systems is merely a particular historical marker, a rule of thumb measure for a particular event, or whether it indicates a generalisable rule of production, taking in the succession of manufactured crises of recent decades, is open to conjecture. In other words, we are set the question: is the repressive apparatus permanently stuck at manufacturing only two products to the exploitative life-world’s manufacturing of three? Is there always a relative delay in the abstract temporal movement of repressive production (ten years behind over 30 years, 100 years behind over 300 years) when measured against the abstractly emancipatory movement of the community of capital? 

We must assume that it is because, after all, this is our very definition of the function of capital in history, where capitalism is understood as the abstracting totality’s exponential real movement towards the emergent production of a self-emancipating, self-estranging, second nature, and its accompanying negation of all that is solid, the inherited and unproductive mediations and constraints of the past. Let us take that fantasy as real, then what are the consequences? 

Firstly, in practice, the exploitative lifeworld suggests an alternative operating system to the cost-heavy, reality principle oriented, repressive sublimating engine that drives the wheezing labour republic. It proposes a world where the frictionless emancipation of manufactured immaterial communities escape the chronic drain of inherited, materially constituted, redundant and dependent, arrangements of real live people. Ideologically, the abstraction of social wealth is sufficiently rationalised wherever community representation is proposed as the goal of the production of wealth. Then, wherever formal representation is enshrined, actual, material interests may be denied.  

It is not an accident that the west materially exited the covid interregnum and returned to full production via its export of the mobilising ideologies of Me-Too feminism and BLM, as these were the dominant content-generators of the productive network in 2020 - the lucrative vax-antivaxx spectacle only really got going in 2021. The law of social reproduction may be presented simply: abstract communities of representation will escape the complex contradictions and constraints of material communities as constituted around the deep and irreducible costs which express historical need (or, rights are cheaper than needs). 

Or to put it another way, once the Chinese apparatus expands to incorporate equivalents to feminism and anti-racism, as it once incorporated anti-imperialism, as factors of production, it will immediately make up the delay in its efficiency (demonstrating its effective transformation from a regime of repressive sublimation to an environment of emancipatory  exploitation). At the event of its incorporating abstract representation, it will find itself also arriving at the juncture where it is free to disinvest safely from, and thus abandon by forgetting, the materially constituted needs of its actual populace - which up to that very point dragged on its forces of abstraction, being historically expressive of the subjective pole of the bargain at the core of the system of repressive deferral organised under the rubric of the state’s constituted reality principle.  

Secondly, and this is implied by the above, so it needs only to be boldly stated as a guide rule: where exploitation escapes repression, reproduction becomes the mode of production - that is to say, wherever repression is escaped, ‘you are the product’ becomes the whole of the law. Not only does the exploitative totality tend to escape the labour process via its more direct, approaching immanent, and thus post-efficient, metabolisation of, by fusing with, desiring-activity, it also tends to escape the entirety of the historical value system reliant on systematic abstraction of quantities of living labour. The exploitative umwelt proposes a mode of abstraction that itself escapes the fetter of the value form.