Montréal Counter-information

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Each generation must, in relative opacity,  discover its mission: fulfill it or betray it. —Frantz Fanon

Our generation is up against a wall. And by generation, we don’t mean the mainstream division by age groups, but rather all those who, at a given time, ask themselves the same questions and face the same problems. The wall we are facing is that of meaning. This is what makes us orphans. Political orphans; orphans of forms, explanations, and words by which to make sense of the historical conflictuality in which we are involved. As Jacques Camatte observed in 1973, 

Militants go from one group to another, and as they do so they “change” ideology, dragging with them each time the same load of intransigence and sectarianism. A few of them manage extremely large trajectories, going from Leninism to situationism, to rediscover neo-bolshevism and then passing to councilism. They all come up against this wall and are thrown back further in some cases than in others.¹

This rebound effect is always present: some become Marxists after being thrown back by the failures of a territorial struggle, others become formalists by ricocheting off the disappointments of community, and still others are propelled into movementism by the failures of their group. All seek in these different forms the answers that will illuminate the situation and give them the means to fight.

The fact is that our period of experimentation differs from that which characterized the previous cycle of struggle. The same questions no longer have the same answers. What the various revolutionary perspectives of the 20th century had in common was programmatism. In short: revolution would be brought about by the rise of the proletariat as a class and its reappropriation of the capitalist productive forces. Anarcho-syndicalist, socialist, Trotskyist, or Maoist, this was the starting point for all ways of thinking about the overthrow of capitalist society, each pointing to it as the enemy to be defeated. We now find ourselves with a much weaker capacity for strategic clarity than those who came before us. How can we break down the wall of meaning that so many have bounced off of over the past few decades?

For us, meaning has long been linked to our experience of politics: a refusal of the world and an experimentation within that refusal, the attempt to make a community out of it. A common relationship to politics is what we might call a subjectivist understanding of the meaning of commitment, an existential relationship to politics. This way of thinking, which says, “I choose to fight because it is a way of living intensely, fully,” is contradicted when politics appears redundant rather than new, when intensity leaves the terrain of politics, when the community is torn apart. We chase the madness of movement elsewhere, in the couple form, in work, in art, or else we abandon ourselves to our own madness. This way of thinking is matched by an objectivist conception of meaning, which asserts that “revolution will be the result of a gradual rise to power of the masses,” and that history is moving inexorably in this direction. The latter decays as the labor movement is swallowed up by the world of capital, and the language of protest reinforces the political construction of power. The emphasis on the historical determination of revolution, dictated by objective material conditions, is undone by movements that die without attempting insurrection and without building a counter-power, as attempts at revolution give rise to new governments that are just as lamentable as those they leave behind.

Without falling into either of these dead ends, or denying the force that each carries, we say: revolution is not necessary — as an inevitable necessity of history — but it really is possible. We believe that developing this possibility, and the possibility of acting, within it, as an ethical as well as a political force, involves raising the question of organization. The problem of organization concerns the time that separates our present from a possible revolution. This time is a time of questioning and political experimentation, but also of ethical experiments that bind us to this wager. For if revolution is only possible, it is also possible that it will not happen, that the catastrophic course of events will continue. That is why we must continue to reaffirm our choice of it every occasion we get.

With this in mind, the present text aims to contribute, locally and internationally, to the debate on revolutionary organizational forms. In the cycle of struggle that is coming to an end, destitution has been a powerful driving force. Rather than closing this chapter by denying its significance, it is crucial to learn from it and open a new phase of political experimentation. By developing certain shared fictions — destitution, the revolutionary camp, and the nucleus — our aim is to deepen the intuitions that have proven correct, while dissecting those that have led us astray. Such tools can change our relationship to what transpires across the various political landscapes we encounter. We are not alone in our search for answers. This is what drives each of us to seek, despite differences in language and despite the gap between our experiences, what brings us together, and to inquire whether what we have in common seems sufficient. We’ve only just begun.

Destituent movements

Destitution was vividly expressed by the slogan “¡Que se vayan todos!”², which was the watchword of the Argentinian movement in the early 2000s. In the years that followed, the same unrest spread, marked not only by a refusal of the world as it is, but even more so by a refusal to seek an outcome that would bring closure to any particular political sequence. The aim was to do away with all conceptions of “social change” and with the prospect of taking power. “Fuck toute,” said the student strikers in Quebec in 2015. In the same way, something is happening today on a global scale, an exacerbation of political violence in the streets that claims no legitimacy, is not based on any clearly identifiable subject, and is not justified by any social project.

In 2008, Mario Tronti exclaimed, against his own Leninist political grammar, that another history was opening up, one in which the logic of revolt no longer relates to a project of building something, but consists entirely in putting all that is into crisis; it is no longer merely political, but ethical. For Tronti, ethical revolt reflects the state of crisis in which working-class subjectivity finds itself as the bearer of a positive project. It testifies to the collapse of programmatism. What is revealed in this type of revolt is precisely the refusal of the totality of the social model, which leaves no room for any exteriority, intruding into even the most intimate aspects of our lives. Ethics thus surfaces in contemporary revolts because it accounts for the totalizing grip of domination, something that classical political responses have failed to do. Moreover, what is at stake and being fought against in these revolts is not an enemy that could be conceived as totally external to us, but also something that runs through us. It is not only the institution or the commodity, but our need for them, their hold over us. It is a certain relationship to the world, ways of thinking, doing, and loving that are being disrupted. The destituent hypothesis therefore assumes that other forms of life can be invented from within this rejection of the world. Certain central elements of the classical revolutionary tradition are thus discarded: the seizure of state power, the declaration of a new constitution, or the decree, from above, of new revolutionary institutions.

The historicist hypothesis according to which destitution is “the dynamic of the era following the defeat of the labor movement,” is one possible use of the concept of destitution, a descriptive one. Although interesting, this analysis remains insufficient, as it offers a unilateral view of what takes place in political situations. In fact, their reality is an ambivalent one. As Kiersten Solt stated in her critique of Endnotes: “Contemporary upheaval is the site of a conflictual encounter between destituent gestures and constituent forces.”³ Although more precise, this statement does not completely convince us either. The political thinking that follows from it remains limited. If we need to think beyond the opposition between destituent gestures and constitutive force, this is because it does not allow us to imagine what a destituent force might be. Our role as revolutionaries cannot be reduced to the dissemination or explanation of certain gestures made within movements. This is the limitation that has also been encountered by hypotheses such as the meme-with-force, or the generalization of gestures such as the front line or the black bloc. By giving centrality to forms invented in the breaches opened up by revolts, it is no longer even certain that such a conception of destitution is a conception of revolution.

In recent debates, much has been written about destitution as a negative gesture, and not enough about what a revolutionary destituent politics could or should be. For us, it is a question of knowing how to differentiate between a historical description and a gesture of political prescription. Starting from the observation that destituent dynamics are at work, without limiting ourselves to describing them, represents for us a first step toward formulating a destituent position. From this point, however, we see two paths emerging: the destitution of politics, and the politics of destitution. Our goal in this text is to identify some of the impasses we see in what we call the destitution of politics, and then to outline a politics of destitution.

The destitution of politics

What the movement of the squares, the ZADs, the insurrections of recent years, and the “non-movements” in which life is reinvented through struggle show above all is an insurmountable gap between the aspirations of those who take up the struggle and their political translations, even by the most radical organizations. Destitution refers to the realization that there will no longer be any organization that can unite all demands, at least none that is not a scam within a negotiation framework, none that does not benefit the state. If even “revolutionary” organizations fall far short of what is happening everywhere on the planet at the slightest sign of insurrection, what is the point of holding on to them? 

In recent years, one of the responses that has emerged argues that we should instead focus on sharing these moments, certain experiences of the world, and the ethical shift that emerges in polarized situations. As the title of the journal Entêtement suggests, it is a matter of “holding a sensibility.”

Everywhere in this era, the representative [identity-based] “we” is overwhelmed by the experiential “we,” which is so malleable and unstable, yet so powerful. The representative “we” on which this society is built cannot understand this historic emergence of an experiential “we.” They are literally terrified, traumatized, and outraged by it.⁴

One form of what we call the destitution of politics states that what needs to grow is the distance between ethics (experiential “we”) and politics (representative “we”). The widespread disillusionment with representative politics and the opening up of questions beyond the logic of interest certainly point to an opening in which we need to deep dive. Taking a stand for ethics in this manner, however, tends to evacuate the possibility of a “we” that is neither representative nor purely experiential, but partisan. A new idea of politics can arise from the failure of its representative concept.

If they are not supported by a political form, ethical revolts fall prey to two kinds of betrayal. The most obvious is reformist betrayal: a revolt against the whole world (including our way of being in it) goes down in history as a movement against one of its particular aspects, or as a victory giving rise to a sense of progress and justice.⁵ The other betrayal is one that, while recognizing the total nature of the political challenge, forgets the centrality of revolt in the emergence of this truth and, from there, retreats into ethics. It is easy to imagine the former: movement leaders who have become politicians, NGO presidents, professional leftists of all kinds. The latter are those who, having experienced revolt, see their lives turned upside down and, in an attempt to secede from everything, ultimately break with revolt itself. Having entered movements through the political door, they leave through the ethical door and try to create a world in which this way of being can flourish. After the intoxication of the movements, many think they can continue in this way. 

The attempt to formulate an orientation based on ethical withdrawal tends too easily to lead down the path of what we call alternativism. Alternativism is one of the figures we associate with the destitution of politics. By focusing on projects as projects, it offers the possibility of pleasing everyone. For radicals, the alternativist horizon is that of a counter-society, while for reformists, change will come about through the gradual spread of these practices within the economy. In short, there is no head-on struggle with the hegemony of the economy, no thought of going beyond “what is possible, here and now,” only abdication in the face of the struggle to be waged. The fact that, instead of fighting, radicals and reformists are defending the proliferation of short supply chains, bioregions, and community service centers is more indicative of the historical defeat of revolutionaries than their ideological victory.

Before long, infrastructure that was supposed to serve as support becomes its own end. By putting in place infrastructures that are not immediately political, we hope to contribute to a possible political situation, or even a future crisis. Thus, in its autonomous form, alternativism expresses a distance from the insurrectionary fabric, and places antagonism in a future time. A day will come when these lands will feed the communards. Who can be against virtue? In any case, the prefiguration of a post-revolutionary world, coupled with a desire to build it now, has taken precedence over the construction of a political force.

Which forms after informality?

Until recently, the emphasis on ethical revolt went hand in hand with the rejection of all forms of organization. For a while, alternativism appeared to be a serious path that didn’t betray what had given rise to it. More broadly, while informality and destitution seemed to go hand in hand, we quickly felt their limits. In many ways, the last few years have seen the question of organization come back with a vengeance.

Informal organization, which is the implicitly dominant option in the current cycle of struggle, is running out of steam and meets criticism from all sides. The dynamic, which was based on the recurrence of classic social movements in which reformist or pseudo-revolutionary organizations could be overwhelmed, criticized, and fought, reached its swan song with the pandemic. After the last insurrectionary outbreaks, any political possibility was crushed by the authoritarian management of Covid. Most of the pre-existing informal groups were reduced to their involvement in various projects (community, mutual aid, neighborhood, social center, business, magazine), if not to maintaining a pessimistic, even cynical attitude toward any political attempt. Of course, there are still informal groups that maintain political relationships by participating in this or that struggle, but as a hypothesis, it no longer makes sense.

The failure of the first phase of destituent experimentation — which could be defined as the first two decades of the 21st century — has thus produced a formalistic reaction that manifests itself in the creation of open groups. This reaction believes it can remedy the weakness of the revolutionary movement through technical solutions: formal structures of engagement that allow for the broadening of the organizational base. Some have thus reacted to the obvious failings of informality⁶ by donning the old clothes of politics: they oppose the clandestine nature of the crew with formal, public, open groups aimed at breaking the isolation of a politics condemned as sectarian. But strangely enough, old clothes smell like old clothes and formalism is returning to frameworks centered on social categories, such as class and other objective markers, or (it’s often both) to vanguardist theories of organization.

The pendulum has swung back, leading former advocates of informality to respond to the problem of numbers, commitment, and isolation with public structures, and to the unspeakability of their ethical and political content through broad petitions of principle (anti-capitalist, feminist, environmentalist, etc). Their publicity, presumed to be a guarantee of expansion and propagation, leads in the end to a feeling of being too exposed to carry the desired intensity, or to draw strength from it after the fact. Moreover, in critical moments, open spaces do not provide the confidence necessary to really get involved, and the vague sharing of identity or principles does not generate real commitment.

To seek the solution to the problem of strength in a mode of appearing is to pose the question backwards. Public organization may well give a momentary feeling of power, but this proves deceptive in moments when the police attempt to systematically crush what springs forth. As these public organizations succeed in their political construction, they are defeated by repression. They do not contain the seeds of their overcoming, but of their own crushing. At a time of surveillance and control specific to the faltering of the global capitalist order, there can be no openly — and truly — revolutionary group in the public sphere.

In addition to the problem of appearance, returning to the use of outdated historical fictions or sociological categories derived from new criticism cannot provide meaning to contemporary conflict. These terms found their strength in their ability to give meaning to what was experienced. They were devices for simplification, as political concepts always are. Today, the rhetorical pirouettes and academic arsenal needed to give them meaning testify to their fragility, not their strength. Programmatism did not run its course because the labor movement was defeated as an enemy, but rather because it was swallowed up by the world of capital. Everything that made the labor movement strong has been integrated into the reign of the economy. What could be seen as the expression of the proletariat, or as Marx put it, of an “order that is the dissolution of all orders,” has been lost. The labor movement was born in the economy, so it is not surprising that it died there.

For many, there is a great temptation to return to class struggle as a general explanation. It serves as an analytical crutch in their search for the power that these historical hypotheses actually brought into existence. Instead of taking this path, we ask ourselves: what force was made possible by the hypothesis of class struggle?  

Even if the terminology of the past cannot help us grasp the complexity of the events that arise, the fact remains that fiction is a serious matter. We need fiction to believe in the reality of what we are experiencing. The most urgent political task is to find and share the terms that give meaning to our experiences, to what opposes domination, exploitation, destruction, and all forms of power. Money is a fiction, as are the state and the law. We must oppose our fictions to those imposed on us. Paired with the concept of destitution, the nuclei and the revolutionary camp allow for the recapitulation of historical conflictuality.

Organizing a destituent force

Destitution implies a “crisis of what is,” a total rejection of the world. The stance we are calling the “destitution of politics” is part of this negativity. However, due to its ambiguous relationship with conflictuality, it fails to participate in the development of a revolutionary force — a force capable of confronting constituent power, not just to call for desertion from it. Furthermore, the formalistic public response, the renewal of anti-capitalism, necessarily fails to meet the demands of clandestinity imposed by power.

As we stated above, although destituent dynamics are at work in contemporary movements, they are too often covered up by pacification, order, and the reign of normality. For Idris Robinson, the task of revolutionaries is to reveal the destituent dynamics in order to disrupt the order of things and precipitate it into an uncontrollable conflict. Rather than saying that destitution is immanent in contemporary revolts, he argues that the unmanageable conflictual situation is in fact the result of the organization of a destituent force. It is therefore necessary to “organize a power capable of producing a diametrically opposed enemy, thereby provoking such a savage confrontation that it leads to a totally unmanageable, uncontrollable, and ungovernable situation.”⁷

It is obvious that there is no switch that can magically trigger such a confrontation so savage that it would lead to a totally uncontrollable situation. What is possible is to seek out, push, and reveal the antagonisms contained in each situation. At the very least, we must rebuild an imaginary of political struggle and seek out those who can agree on similar approaches. If the destitution of politics has for the moment taken the form of refusals, the content of what a politics of destitution might be remains to be elaborated. The question, then, is how to develop a political force capable of reinforcing the revolutionary polarity within situations, of making the destituent option stronger. How can we ensure that “none remain”?

To arm destitution with a politics allows us to imagine a positive content for the various refusals it entails. The politics we are attempting to describe here concerns the way in which we remain faithful to situations that disrupt the ordinary course of things, so that what opens up in these situations does not close again as soon as normality resumes. Badiou put it aptly when he wrote that “the party” is what organizes fidelity to the emancipatory event, carrying its consequences as far as possible. 

What is then revealed, and what we must remain faithful to, is the following truth: the normality of the economy is not the only conceivable path; it is possible to make choices based on other logics. We must politicize the refusals that emerge in revolt and that can irreversibly disrupt our lives by becoming part of us. If ethical revolts have the power to erupt, the challenge is to find the political forms that make them last over time, the statements that make them shareable beyond experience. Remaining faithful to this truth means continuing to nurture this upheaval. This shared density exists in opposition to the economy and necessarily imposes something that transcends our own lives. From there, politics calls upon the idea of a “we” that is a belonging but which we must always try to place within a horizon, including as participants in a camp.

A contemporary, deeply liberal inclination, leads some to conclude that they must avoid involvement in any group, that “my life is my choice.” Ultimately, it would be more interesting to navigate the emotional misery of existential liberalism than to get caught up in what could become a sectarian drift. The critique of activism that we ourselves spread was in fact too soluble in this epoch.⁸ To break out of this dead end, we believe it is necessary to formalize political spaces. Formalize in the sense of giving shape and putting into words, so as to clarify the contours of a position: who shares it, how porous is it, how do we relate to it, and how can we strengthen it?

We also believe that it is possible to formalize our positions without betraying our belonging to a larger “we,” that of the insurgents, our historical party. In other words, we need to give ourselves political forms, while knowing that situations will reveal their limits, and they will have to be overcome. Our partisan coordination bodies, our revolutionary nuclei, must never lose sight of their relationship to a larger conspiracy. The plan remains that of revolution in the moment of insurrection. Everything else is merely prolegomena.

On the one hand, the “revolutionary milieu,” largely characterized by informalism and a refusal to commit, is clearly not up to the task. Out of fear of confronting the wall of meaning, or out of a guilty leftist conscience, we have developed a reflex of creating spaces for others — even if it means stating half-truths we don’t believe in the hopes of increasing our numbers. In the absence of a space in which to bring strategic orientations into play — not in terms of sectoral struggles, but in terms of the revolutionary horizon — the various organizational attempts are doomed to produce radical agitation with no future. On the other hand, current formalizing responses are insufficient to rebuild a force capable of bringing about and growing the revolutionary possibility. Here we propose to outline the contours of this force, which we refer to as the revolutionary camp, and the more restricted space from which we conceive it, the nucleus.

Building the revolutionary camp

The Party, which not so long ago held the vast majority of revolutionary organizations within its fold, has been replaced in recent decades by the milieu. What binds revolutionaries today is essentially a set of implicitly political interpersonal relationships. The milieu is a fantasy of organization, an aggregate without a horizon, almost accidental, which reproduces itself through ritualized dates (book fairs, annual demonstrations, etc.), in a radical aesthetic, or through the creation of new projects that will die as quickly as they are born. Although it can concentrate its strength during this or that event, it must be admitted that this form has not produced the slightest political clarification that goes beyond its microcosm in the last decade. Nothing very threatening for the moment.

However, there is undoubtedly still something like an “historical party,” a way of naming all the people and gestures that are actively working to overturn the world of the economy and its governments. While this way of envisioning things inspires us, we believe that it is only possible to form something like a camp if we are truly organized. We need fictions — ideas that allow us to think about and recognize ourselves — that push us to produce forms. A plane of consistency. For us, the revolutionary camp is not only a place for sharing ideas, but also for actively taking sides for revolution. It must serve as a space for discussion, strategic planning, and organization among different groups. The camp is a space, it is not an institution that can be replicated with its codes and procedures. Rather, it is a way of thinking about conspiracy, a form that is beginning to spread. The revolutionary camp is therefore both a hypothesis and a concrete form for political organization.

The purpose of a space such as the camp is primarily to remedy the scattered and isolated nature of revolutionary forces. In a given situation, coordination within the camp leads us to consider more powerful interventions, both tactically and in terms of discourse. Avoid multiplying calls and confusion. If necessary, think about disagreements on political and strategic grounds, not in terms of misunderstandings or interpersonal conflicts. Outside of the movement, when forces tend to withdraw into themselves, the camp establishes a space where exchange allows for endurance over time. In the same way, the camp offers a strategic distance between the forces that compose it. Instead of merging them, it allows for their interplay.

The camp does not constitute a point of enunciation, a new political subject capable of acting and expressing itself. We seek to organize the conspiracy: to find ways of bringing together the various forces at play and to break out of our impasses. However, the camp cannot be reduced to a space that represents the elements that compose it. Groups should not approach it in the mode of a congress — where everyone seeks to assert the positions of their political unit over those of others — nor in the mode of an assembly, from which a decision must emerge by individual vote count. The decisions taken there are based on the possibility of agreements and initiatives that cut across the forces that compose it: a new situation may lead to an original initiative that does not overlap with the previous division or with all the groups present, but is a new set of its own. Belonging is based on the encounter between different positions, and it must always be updated; but for this reason, it is more sincere.

In addition to belonging achieved through a common political sense and the choice of a shared narrative, we also believe in the generative nature of commitment. The camp must provide formal and concrete spaces that have an interiority, that are linked to active presence and participation: spaces for discussion, debate, planning, debriefing, etc. The degree of formalization, as well as the characteristics of the groups that compose it, and the question of whether it can include individuals or only groups, remain to be determined based on the basic guidelines set by those who use this space.

Although the camp does not require all its members to have the same priorities, it nevertheless presupposes a basic criterion and orientation, which is to raise and bring to life the question of revolution: the ability to say “we,” even if this necessarily covers differences. But the label “revolutionary,” applied indiscriminately, cannot be a guarantee of belonging. The camp is not a milieu or network that gathers all kinds of tendencies with their claims to radicalism. For the forces that belong to the camp, political activity must be part of a strategy that can be explained. In the absence of a strategy, there looms the problem of a “black box” capable of magically transforming any form of reformist involvement into revolutionary activity.

Obviously, it is impossible to decide outside of any given situation what exactly defines a revolutionary position. This exercise in discernment remains fundamental; it is through this door that we must one day emerge from the tunnel of deconstruction. We will not be fooled again by reformism or the seizure of state power. Revolution implies an upheaval of the established order and ways of life by the insurgent masses. All those who work tirelessly for the advent of this upheaval and decide to organize on this basis will participate in the revolutionary camp.

Forming dense nuclei

What political forms would be found within the revolutionary camp? Undoubtedly a little bit of everything we have seen before: affinity groups, small communist cells, groups of friends, members of political organizations, milieu pillars, people making attempts in territorial struggles, on social or economic issues, etc. The composition would surely vary depending on the location, the level of intensity, and the forms of political organization specific to each place. However, the formation of dense and determined political units would drastically change the strength of a space such as the revolutionary camp, and more broadly, the general political atmosphere. These units are what we call revolutionary nuclei.

One of the current limitations we see is the lack of a clear position coming from organized groups. The affinity group, as well as the broad formal organization, are each affected by this shortcoming. In order to formulate a position, a revolutionary nucleus should ask itself certain questions: What is our framework for analysis? What is our strategic perspective for the coming months and years? What are we going to prioritize? Why? What interpretations do we share of our common experiences? Of our failures and successes? It is not a question of producing grand meta-narratives, universal explanations that seek to encompass all experiences and situations. Our interpretations must be able to adapt to the situation and emerge directly from it; once they become fixed, they confines us. We need to be able to come together around a set of articulated considerations that can be heard and shared by others. 

Revolutionary nuclei are the kind of political forms capable of accomplishing this task, in that they constitute the most dense form of political organization. It is not the number of members within a nucleus that creates its density, but rather the political position decided upon by those who comprise it. Its position cannot be summed up in broad principles or shared identities. Rather, it constitutes a strong political agreement that has consequences.

The lack of positioning among organized groups contributes to the confusion that currently prevails. Without proposals on the table, it is impossible to understand each other or to situate ourselves in relation to one another other than through effects of distinction; the interpersonal takes precedence over the political. By definition, a position is both one of the coordinates that allows an object to be located in relation to another and the orientation that this object takes according to its horizon. The nucleus must be a point of enunciation. Taking a position means expressing, stating, and formulating, like a stance one decides to take to be taken, a reading of the world to which to rally. However, a position is also the way in which something is arranged and organized. Form is inseparable from substance. In the nucleus, commitment is based on trust and understanding, which strengthen bonds and maintain form over time. This understanding develops through a mutual agreement: prioritizing something that affects a much broader horizon than the collective life of the group.

Each nucleus necessarily rests on an ethical foundation, whether explicit or not. For us, political engagement implies a profound transformation of life; it means challenging our relationship with money and work, experimenting with collective life, sharing not only material things — what we have — but also who we are, our desires, and the decisions we make. Opening up the space of the common defies the logic of appropriation and valorization within the group. Without wanting to reduce politics to life itself, we believe that what we share is meaningful: we believe that life is changed when it is experienced together. It is what gives strength and sustains commitment. 

From our experience, the lack of clarification of forms is one of the problems with crews and affinity groups. This ambiguity hinders their porosity and makes their criteria for belonging arbitrary. While we recognize the intensity of collective experimentation and the conspiratorial opacity that drives them as important, the core structure offers the possibility of formalizing procedures, clarifying rhythms, and problematizing modes of entry and exit. In this sense, it resembles a broad formal organization. In order not to become stagnant, the nucleus necessarily seeks to meet other nuclei, to become stronger and wiser. It is through belonging to the nucleus that the commitment of its members can be maintained and clarified. Similarly, sharing proposals and a commitment to them makes its expansion possible.

Nuclei only really make sense to the extent that they remain in dialogue with other nuclei and the wider space of the revolutionary camp. While for the moment we are only able to experiment with cores of this kind involving a few dozen people, our wager is that it is possible to do so with many more. History is full of all kinds of experiments that, without betraying the density of their bonds, were able to grow in number.

Spaces of experimentation: communism, use, politics

If an immense gap sometimes seems to separate revolutionaries — that of theoretical and political vocabulary — our inclinations point in a common direction. As political orphans, exhausted from constantly being thrown back by the wall of meaning, at least two things bring us together. The first, and more immediate, is revealed in what we seek to encounter or provoke in the various social movements or situations we face: gestures of rupture, discourses that elude the logic of law and legitimacy, ungovernable impulses. It is through a supplement of organization, and not through simple participation, that what is lacking in a situation can be figured out and carried through. The second lies in our desire to confront the revolutionary question based on the failures of the last century and the obstacles of our immediate present. Our paths point toward a withdrawal from the politics of power, but to date they have been in tension with the formulation of our own politics and with the principle of organization. It is within this tension that we orient ourselves.

We speak of strategic spaces as a use of politics. But what makes this use possible or, more generally, what makes politics possible? We are committed to the negative dimension of destituent politics, because we know that it is in the destruction of state power that the possibility of communization lies. Insurrection, the political event par excellence, is precisely the privileged moment, because it allows the most general question possible to be opened up to the greatest number of people possible. In it, any prefigurative or planning attempt would be either humiliated or imposed [imposé]. However, this negative redeployment of politics, its mistrust of ends, requires us to rethink the meaning of communism, which has served as the horizon in the politics of the last century. Communism has been disastrously understood as the fabrication of a new world by the state. Today, we instead think of communism as the condition of destituent politics, in at least two ways.

Firstly, communism is the name given to a politics of enmity and antagonism to capital. As Bernard Aspe points out, it is the name given to a general philosophy of antagonism, of irreconcilability with the world, and of the possibility of exteriority here and now. Communism is therefore the name of a possibility of politics, because one politics can only reveal itself in relation to another that serves as its enemy at the level of totality. Not momentarily, in a process of internal modification, but completely. It is specifically by revealing how decisions other than those related to interest are possible that communism establishes itself as the name of a politics against the economy.

Secondly, communism refers to the condition of politics in yet another way: we cannot imagine shouldering [porter] something politically without collective elaboration. This requires the opening of a space in which the question of survival does not constitute the central issue. More than a material arrangement, communism transcends our simple ability to make ends meet, and arises when beings stop counting and instead share what they are as much as what they have. Ethical withdrawal is, after all, only one of the possible forms that destitution can take. If we allow the existential dimension of the destituent movement to become indefinitely inflate, its communist charge ends up neutralized. We are not saying that this dimension should be denied, only that it must be linked to the construction of a political force. 

Communism is therefore an idea that guides us, something we aim to spread as much as we seek to discover it in the world. It is a relationship that allows us to see in a gesture or an event the potential either for division, intensification, or alliance. Communism is experienced by many wherever the logic of appropriation fails, like an ambiance: wherever the distance between those who decide and those who act, between those who own and those who do not is abolished, allowing decisions to be made, orientations decided, practices adopted or eliminated. In this sense, communism can only be experienced at a distance from the state. The soil from which such experiments grow does not lie the pleasure of combat, or any scientific knowledge regarding the possibility that the nightmare might end, even if this can nourish us. Its breeding ground is the shared truth that the nightmare can end.

Of course, our participation in this or that situation is never fully conditioned; we can always be swept up in an event, independently of any space that preceded it or outlives it. However, anyone who finds comrades there and decides to remain faithful to the event will inevitably confront the question: how could this continue? However useful the distinction between ethics and politics, we may be touching here on their point of inseparability.

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Notes

1. Jacques Camatte, “Against Domestication” (1973), online here. The French original was recently republished here.

2. “They must all go” and the second part of the slogan, too often forgotten, “y no quede ni uno solo” (and none must remain), perhaps announces the task of the new phase of destitution that is beginning.

3. Kiersten Solt, “Seven Theses on Destitution,” Ill Will, February 12th, 2021. Online here.

4. Anonymous, Conspiracist Manifesto, trans. Robert Hurley, Semiotexte, 2023, 301.

5. Consider the example of the political sequence of 2012 in Quebec and the way in which it was brought to a close. Many months of heated protest were reduced to the issue of tuition fees and a change of government through elections. 

6. Informal politics has been unable to provide a theory that goes beyond its own experience. It is confined to silence, melancholy, or research.

7. Idris Robinson, “Introduction to Mario Tronti’s ‘On Destituent Power,’” Ill Will, May 22nd, 2022. Online here.

8. The rejection of classical activism, which artificially separates life choices and political perspectives, has generated confusion concerning what constitutes political action. The rejection of classical politics led to a tendency to completely blur the distinction between ethics and politics, rendering the difference between the organization of existence and the development of political forms obscure or ambiguous.