split from What would an anarchist society look like?
I’m guessing here but the reasoning, I think, behind Libcom’s line on this is to disassociate itself from the anarchists’ critique of commodity fetishism because it wants to avoid if at all possible criticising the proletariat’s perceived consumerism, which is taken as a given, and its possessions as an objective index of need. It seems from these statements that Libcom does not accept that the social relation is expressed through its products but that things have an objectively given use-value. It is here that a lifestylist residue reappears in the fetishised appreciation of the thing which is severed from and eclipses the conditions of its manufacture.
in my case at least, there's no projection onto others of 'consumerism' - i really do spend money on these things (drink/drugs/clubs/clothes...) to ameliorate an often boring existence, spending the best part of my waking life doing pointless shit for a wage. in this respect, this kind of consumption is an expression of alienated social relations, although it doesn't follow i wouldn't want to drink or take drugs or dance or wear nice clothes in a communist society. thus i don't think this relates directly to a critique (or absence thereof) of commodity fetishism; remember that commodity fetishism is things appearing as they really are - social relations between objects and material relations between people. as 'libcom consumerism' is accompanied by a critique of underlying social relations, i don't think it's neccessarily true that existing working class culture is separated from relations of production. i wouldn't say any of this means a desire for nice stuff is a bad thing per se, and certainly compared to anarcho-ascetism.
From this it is a small step to imagine communism as the continuing production of the same objects via the same processes, where everything is the same but branded differently. Because of its critique of anarchism, Libcom’s version of communism is stripped of anything that might indicate a break with capital.
this directly contradicts my thoughts on 'what an anarchist society would look like' expressed above, so i'm not sure which amalgamated 'libcom' entity you're addressing.
The thinking goes something like: ‘we need to sell our idea of a communist society, we cannot attack capital at the level of alienation or commodification because the proletariat has passed into the stage of total subsumption and identifies wholly with its role and with its possessions (oh get me another shirt, get me another tie, get me another wollen). Therefore, the only option is to attack the critique of commodity fetishism as ‘lifestylist’ and propose to the workers a governmental solution on the level of ‘everything is going to be the same but you will be in charge’.
it would really help if you'd quote this libcom amalgam you're responding to, because as i say this is directly contradicted by many of the posts above. and like i say commodity fetishism is emphatically not 'liking nice stuff', it is things appearing as they really are, as social relations between things and material relations between people. the critique of this is at the very least implicit above, where i discussed production no longer ruled by value, with workers able to consciously weigh up desires for less work, more enjoyable work, a livable environment etc - i.e. social relations amongst people determining material production.
One thing is certain, the proposals put forward by Libcom within this discussion are not communism
who is 'Libcom'? i'm an admin, you mean me? or an amalgam of your imaginings? i mean as i've said, the position you're criticising is contradicted by the posts on this thread, i'm not sure who's expressing it.
The class struggle will continue upon the territories that Joseph K refuses to engage: where dead labour guarantees existence and where activity is expressed in terms of alienated labour. There can be no communist factories as there can be no communist state or communist prison or communist police force, army etc. There can be no communist capitalism.
well we can call them communist happy production centres if it makes you feel better, but semantic games aside we will still make stuff according to our abilities and needs, and some of those needs (such as for hypodermic needles it has been suggested) are best met by forms of mass production, albeit qualitatively transformed under the concsious control of its agents. quite how people deciding how long, under what conditions and by what processes they work is "capitalist", "alienated labour" or "dead labour" is entirely unclear to me.
The arguments Joseph K puts forward exist somewhere within the spectrum of capitalist politics where liberal investments in the liberating potentials of dead labour, sprinkled with utilitarian/malthusian calculations concerning the optimum shoeing of 7 billion workhorses (as if human existence is captured at the magnitude of ‘billions’), crunch up against simple workerist sentimentality, ‘See personally i wouldn;t care if i had to work on a production line, or sweep the streets or do a bit of cleaning, thats life, i've done some of those jobs in the past and tbh someof them are probably more fulfilling than the shit I do now.’
you're quoting cantdocartwheels and seemingly attributing his views to me. this kind of amalgam argument is either lazy or dishonest, so please stop it. furthermore, i don't see any inherent problem with considering optimality, just that communist optimality is a completely different judgement to capitalist optimality, taking into account the pleasureability of a task, effort-reducing innovations, the externalities on the environment/community etc. To be explicit, this is not something that can or should be explicitly calculated, but something immanent to freely associated labour in common - simply by doing a task people make innovations and learn how to do it better (whether better is defined crudely as more output, or as more enjoyment, less effort, less externalities etc).
Commodity fetishism isn't about desiring commodities, as people who are not familiar with the idea often assume. It is not a critique of "consumer culture". Its the way in which commodities come to appear to have an independent existence as actors in capitalism, seperate from the humanity which created them, and appearing as an immanent fact seperate from social activity - see bourgeois discussion of what "oil" is "doing" for instance. Social relations between things, and objective relations between people. The analogy Marx uses is not with sexual fetishism,such as someone desiring something non-human like a shoe, sexually which would be anarchronistic. It is with religion, the way in which the human mind creates fetishes (as in a religious icon) and imbues them with agency. The things they create come to have power over them.
The point is, there is no way out of capitalism other than revolution or death. The anarcho-asceticism of lifestylists Joseph K mentions is a belief that this isn't true, that we can live differently now. This usually leads to alternative forms of consumption - "independent" music and second hand clothes for instance - anyway. So the point is that given libertarian communists (against what you say) usually understand what capitalism is, and how to get rid of it, worrying about something inescapable in the here and now is a waste of time and effort, and usually involves retreat into some kind of dropout subculture.
But I have no idea what this "Libcom" creature is which is telling you that workers have no agency to take the fight to capital due to "subsumption", so they have to "rebrand" capitalism in some sort of Sorelian fantasy. The libcom groups workers' bulletins say nothing remotely like this, and the discussion in the thread says the opposite. Is it because the website is nicely presented or something?
This is a poor argument. As has been expressed above, a factory is being defined a site with a larger productive capacity than small workshops. No-one has said that they will not be fundamentally transformed in communism, that abstract labour will not be abolished. As no-one has advocated a communist society involving commodity production, wage labour, capital accumulation and private property, I’m assuming you’re repeating the crypto-primitivist argument that capitalism = technology when you say people are advocating "communist capitalism". There is nothing inherently capitalistic about machinery, what is capitalistic is its use, the purposes and ends towards which it proceeds. Does your logic extend to saying, there can be no communist medicine, no communist schools, no communist workshops, no communist electric drills, no communist chemicals etc?,