Why are some communists considered to be to the 'left' of others?

Oh I'm sorry, I didn't know Camatte produced a groundbreaking critique of capitalism when he wasn't writing his primitivist stuff. Marx had many flaws, and I'm no fan of the man, but his legacy goes far, far beyond some dodgy "theory of rackets."
My point was simply that since his understanding of Marx has led him to embrace an explicitly anti-Marxist and illogical (not because it is anti-Marxist of course) point of view, maybe his understanding of Marx was shaky to begin with; then again, maybe not. Since when is voicing an opinion grounds for sending in the Spanish Inquisition? I don't see how Noa was being so outrageously arrogant above; AFAIS he was just voicing skepticism regarding this whole "rackets vs. parasites" charade. Is that not allowed, Mr. Marut?

I don't see Leninism as a form of Marxism, so no. Leninism is narodnikism dressed up in Marxist verbiage, and therefore does not negate, or confirm, Marx in any way.

Everyone is a witness, but there is no such thing as an "observist." Whether you like it or not, we live in a world where you have to take sides (despite all the toss that gets trumpeted about this "apolitical age of consensus"). That was my point.

Yes they do (as ways to understand, not define, individual behaviour), because I don't like to pretend that politics doesn't matter. It is a dangerous game to play, and one in which those without political power are bound to lose. I need to know where people stand; this is why I like to be as straightforward as possible. I could have asked you "how do you feel about this and the other," but I prefer not to waste words and time. If that offends you in some way, I apologize.

see above.
No one said anything about defining yourself according to any label. That said, it's no use to beat around the bush. Either you are a communist, or you're not.

I don't see how it's useful as a "concept." All political groups want to influence the ideas that are dominant in society. Some political groups' ideas are reprehensible, others have good ideas but some of their members are less than adequate. This is what life is like. I don't see a need for a "theory of rackets" as if this "racketeering" was some unique historical development. Opportunism, profiteering have always been around; simply acknowledging this and being wary of it does more than the whole tedium of the "rackets vs. parasites" debate (both concepts being equally superfluous as someone has already stated; I thnk it was Noa)

There are problems with the ICC and other Party-focused communist groups. I'm not going to deny that.

Yes, I agree. The Party has historically been used, esp. by the Bolsheviks as a way to retard revolutionary efforts rather than advance them. This is because once in power, people want to stay in power. Again, not sure why the racket theory is necessary to explain this when it is pretty self-evident.
Nothing like 1917-21 will ever happen again, I agree; that is because the material conditions that created the RR were historically unique. However, great revolutionary waves will happen again, and in this sense, one must always be on one's toes when it comes to the Party and its nefarious influence on the working class. Here I agree that critical observation is necessary and highly useful.

The current relevance is that anarchism proposes a way for the emancipation of the working classes, the only way that does not entail trading old masters for new, "proletarian" ones. Bakunin's thought isn't error-proof; neither is Kropotkin's, but both have relevant things to say when it comes to today's world. If you care to argue against that, you can do so in a different thread.

I realize that. I didn't think it was about Lorca's beliefs.

This is baseless slander. Durruti was absolutely opposed to those who wanted to cooperate with the republican government (e.g. the reformist CNTista Angel Pestana). Because he stood up in defence of the revolution you call him a "warlord"? Come off it.

But they were. And they weren't members of the FAI and the CNT because they had been seduced by "rackets". They were members because they understood that working class organization, not pie in the sky dreams of total emancipation, make the social revolution. Yes, their leadership let them down, as they were bound to from the first time they contemplated acting like political leaders, but that does not mean that workers and peasants, and women and artists and whoever, were not members of the FAI and the CNT. The numbers speak against you my friend.

I have not done that, and I know that Lorca was not an anarchist. He was however targeted as much for his political sympathies as for his status as social outcast, no? He was at the very least anti-fascist.

It is a salutary reminder how ex post facto it is all so easy to tear everything to bits without even bothering to understand what people at that time were trying to accomplish. But let's not go into that, there is a separate thread about Seidman on this forum.

It did not, but not because of the "rackets" in the CNT and FAI. That would be a grotesquely unhistorical explanation. It happened because the anarchists were fighting against the double-headed behemoth of fascism and republicanism, it happened because there was no international revolutionary context, besides the irrelevant Stalinist IBs, it happened, yes, because its self-styled leadership was sucked into the political dead end. It happened for many reasons that have specific historical contexts.
"Rackets" obscure the historical truth, and simply lay the blame on an abstract "organizational practice," as if organizations were entities with wills of their own, and not subject to the whims, passions, madness, or whathaveyou, of its members.

There is none, no.

I am not disparaging them, but neither can quietist observation substitute for action. What I mean by this is not an empty call to "do something, anything" but I'm not even sure if you believe that there is any merit in furthering the class struggle, given your pessimism about its recuperation by "organization rackets."

There is clearly a whole lot of space between "What is to be done?" and doing nothing. What does "billions" mean here? Like I said above, it is very naive to think that politics (and here I should clarify that by politics I don't mean the political opportunism of the anarchist "leadership" during the SCW)
is only the business of the few, comfortable "rackets," while the masses out there do not care about such rarified issues. There is no one single voice for these "billions." Most of them are trampled under foot by capital every day, that much is certain. But that has not led to any great revolutionary upsurges as of yet. This is because what you call racketeering, honest communists and anarchists call education and agitation and dissemination of revolutionary ideas. It was not long ago that I had my hopes in all sorts of liberal and social democratic projects, because I, like many of these billions, did not understand or know the true source of misery in this society. I came to anarchism all on my own, without any racket dragging me by the collar, and although I am not a member of any political group, I do not for a minute believe that a social revolution can be achieved without organizations of the working class, like you do.
Some on this board belittle this project of education and spreading of revolutionary ideas, and prefer, in their own words to "do nothing," although they still call themselves communists. These people are in my view as reprehensible as the rackets you speak of, only for the opposite reasons.

Totalitarian communist is obviously a contradiction in terms, but as a political bogeyman it runs very strong in the minds of many. This is because the horrendous disaster that was Leninism and later Stalinism have been always trumpeted by bourgeois intellectuals as the failure of communism itself. And some have even argued that even more "liberal" (because in their jargon liberal always stands for enlightened) forms of communism, like that in Spain, were bound to fail because the anarchist groups were all nothing but a bunch of profiteering "rackets." Sounds familiar?

How is it incorrect to state that in a revolution people will die? Is it the same as saying "I want people to die in a revolution" or "Come the revolution, we will make people die"? Not at all, unless you are being deliberately opaque. All communists admit that a revolution is a bloody affair, not all try to profit from it and to take advantage of a revolutionary situation to grab the reins of power.

An extremely weak starting point on two scores. Firstly, more than 6 billion people are not communists and therefore if there must be a conscious commitment to communism as a prerequisite for communism then this by itself would eliminate any possiblity of communism (simply in terms of feasibility). Secondly, a communist is not miraculously self-identical to himself, his perspective is mediated both historically and socially. Which brings us to this:

The point about ‘rackets’ (and why it is a useful concept) is that it locates within self-identified communist groups capitalistic practices. That is to say that in spite of their ideology, communist structures continue to reproduce capitalist relations internally, but they do so in bad faith i.e. they externalise such faults onto their market competitors. No ‘communist’ organisation is honest enough in its aims and principles to describe itself, for example, as a capitalist organisation, a product of capitalist conditions, that is in struggle against its own determinations and mediations – if it did so it would have something interesting to say, it would be acknowledging how complex social relations are and how difficult they are to escape from. I do not think if they defined themselves thus that they could be more unpopular than they currently are. But, instead, communist organisations represent themselves as somehow being defined above all, and even exclusively, by the principles of communism (i.e. they run against the materialist understanding of history).

The debate is not tedious, it is vital – the fact that communist organisations are (let’s not use the term racket) Firms producing products, accumulating capital, exploiting labour (that is reproducing subjectively the general capitalist relation) is the very reason that when given the oppotunity they have tended in all historical revolutionary situations to re-impose capitalist productive relations. The anarchists of Spain never got to the position of achieving the status of what they said they were, they were never simply, ‘anarchists’ (‘and nor were they either anarchists or not anarchists’); despite their best efforts they never gained full control of their activity and interventions and nor do present communist organisations.

I don't know that Camatte wrote anything that is "primitivist" (do you?) - but most, afaik, of what he wrote and is known for isn't (see last para below) and his writing under discussion on this thread isn't. And why is his theory of rackets "dodgy"? Care to explain?

There was no "maybe" in your earlier statement. But I wouldn't assume that someone's "understanding of Marx" must be "shaky to begin with" for them to ackowledge how "groundbreaking" Marx was and yet still come to an "explicitly anti-Marxist" view - unless Marx is The Ultimate Eternal Truth (ie, an ideology in Marxian terms). Camatte might even say that his conclusions are not "anti-Marxist" at all but the logical outcome of the historical application of Marxian thought to the development of capital in this era. You can say he got it wrong, but that doesn't prove he's "anti-Marxist" - only that other claimed strains of Marxisms disagree. By the very nature of calling themselves "Marxist", it seems likely many Marxists would say no one has since been as "groundbreaking" as Marx. That in itself still doesn't negate what else they may say, nor Camatte.

If Leninism is not a Marxism - is there only One True continuity/interpretation of Marx's theory? (That would be a view shared by Leninism.) Mosts Marxisms can quote chapter and verse of Marx to justify their practices, including Leninism; seizure of state power, nationalisation, approval of social-democratic party forms, parliamentarism etc ... One can often find critiques of these in Marx too (reflecting that Marx's theory was changeable and often more radical than his political practice).

Well, Mr 336; so if we express our opinion with conviction when asking for clarification of shallow unsubstantiated dismissals, and go to considerably greater lengths than those we respond to to explain our criticism, we are Inquisitorial? I don't agree. It is the repeated dismissal without any clarification or backing up that is being responded to.

Noa's & co's one line dismissals are typical libcom banalities; a form of pseudo-debate that's anti-theoretical - it often defends the precious frozen ideologies/dogmas/received ideas of ideological authorities, organisations and cliques provided by those who think for others for those who want others to think for them. It seeks to close down the potential expansion of thought and understanding - it only takes one dismissive line to thoughtlessly invoke/reference one's ideological authority and comfort one's self that your guru's eternal truth has a permanent ready-made refutation of all awkward questions. Theorising (or any attempt at understanding and useful dialogue) is the opposite of such unquestioning loyalty. No surprise then that those who use the one-line dismissal the most are the ones least able or willing to flesh out their argument. This kind of one-line dismissal is an attempt to close down consideration of views that threaten the ideological authority of the dismisser's belief system and their gurus. (It can also be used to reference the supposed unchallengeable authority of the dominant herd consensus.) Those who act like this here often have a critique of vanguard groups, so it's worth pointing out that the relationship perpetuated by such practice is as servile as the relationship of vanguard party leadership to member-follower.

Btw, if it's not too Inquisitorial to ask; what evidence is there to justify calling Camatte and his writings "primitivist", as you do? Iirc, he concluded the proles had been integrated into a system of autonomised capital, so were no longer a revolutionary subject, then is rumoured to have gone to live in the countryside. And primitivists have later referenced him as an influence. None of which makes anyone a primitivist. Otherwise, by the same logic, Marx must then be a social democrat or Stalinist (or, via Camatte, a primitivist). I don't know about the content of his post-70s work. Can you reference material that justifies your definition, Vlad?

Typed Camatte in youtube and came up with a lecture about primitivism:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GjxPu3xsdQ

(Don't watch that shit)

What can I say but you really know your stuff. You're teasing us, surely?

Are you kidding me? His Against Domestication is unapologetically primitivist.

.

See my last reply to mciver above.

Funny how a 'debate' about political rackets has now been reduced to denunciations of the supposed 'primitivism' of the 'unapologetically primitivist' Camatte, characterised by selective quotation and the monotonous one-line dismissal, betraying the erudition of a pair of planks (sorry, but it's already been an insult to the intelligence, so I feel justified in that). It's particularly hypocritical of Vlad 336 to 'debate' in such a dishonest way considering the respect he would like people to accord the ideas of Bakunin and Kropotkin:

Camatte's thought isn't error-proof, but he has some relevant things to say when it comes to 'rackets' and so on... I note from the Zizek thread that NRod is capable of stringing more than two sentences together. I've never read Zizek on transcendental materialism or on anything else, so I won't be troubling that thread with any cheap one-liners...

As regards why a serious engagement with a theory of 'rackets' is so difficult for some, I suspect that Ret Marut has hit the nail on the head when he says:

Finally, Vlad336 asked

Ret Marut has already answered that question, at least to my satisfaction. What I find disconcerting is the vaguely inquisitorial tone of the following pronouncement:

I don’t think its fair to call Camatte a primitivist. Even looking at that quote (in full ) which Vlad posted:

He also wrote

This isn’t a rejection of technology, but a recognition that ‘salvation’ doesn’t lie in it, or in its total rejection.

What does the 'domestication' in the title refer to, then?

It's not a denunciation to place a thinker within his larger ideological camp.

Also, it's not enough to say I'm dismissive or ignorant; you need to give the information or arguments I'm supposedly dismissive/ignorant of. Otherwise I can just as well reply that you're dogmatically defensive of Camatte, etc.

As Denna shows, Vlad's use of the Camatte quote to "prove" his primitivism is misleading; so I remain unconvinced that Camatte is a primitivist. Camatte disagrees with some Marxist orthodoxy - enough to label him a heretical "anti-Marxist" by defenders of orthodoxy. But to (rightly or wrongly) revise or reject in the light of historical development parts of Marx's theory is anyway not "anti-Marxist". I say all this not to even defend Camatte's theory - I could completely disagree with it and still make the same criticisms of the shallow dismissals and misrepresentations attempted here.

I can appreciate that the above statement illustrates your preferred method of evaluation and comprehension - 'oh look, a word primitivists use in the title; 'domestication' = primitivism, so I must know what's wrong with that article and can smugly denounce it without reading cos I'm a real Marxist'. Try, for once, reading an article before shooting your mouth off about it.

One doesn't have to agree with this to see that it's not primitivist.

A "camp" that didn't even exist when Camatte wrote what is being called here "primitivist". Guilt by retrospective association - the worst of crimes. More uninformed arrogant nonsense.

Well, I'm happy to learn Camatte is not a primitivist. The less of them, the better.

That is because I have had more exposure to what Bakunin and Kropotkin wrote and thought. There is nothing hypocritical in my understanding of Camatte; this is genuinely how I interpret his meaning in that text. That I misread it is obviously a possibility, and I could do worse than read it again.
Tbh, I am not in the least interested in debating Camatte on this thread, so if my assessment of him is actually misguided then I accept that for now, and retract whatever "bad things" I said about him.
What is more interesting (though equally off-topic considering the OP) is that you "find disconcerting the vaguely inquisitorial tone of the following pronouncement"

So let me just ask you right now, are you one of these "nihilist communists"? Because that would certainly explain why you're so defensive about someone who, if not a primitivist, is at least in the same class as the post-Marxist mystics who trumpet the dissolution of the proletariat and the end of class struggle (people like Postone and others that usually get ripped to shreds around these parts, and for good reason). Or maybe you just like Camatte for some strange reason. Who knows...
There is nothing inquisitorial about what I wrote. I simply expressed a personal opinion regarding the thought and significance of a particular group, while making a larger point in response to miver (looks like it's not just Camatte who's being "selectively quoted"). Inquisitorial is when you don't have anything substantial to add to the debate but go on and on about "oneline dismissals," as if that was the ultimate sin.

on the head of a big fat strawman maybe, because I made no oneline dismissals. My labeling of Camatte as a primmo is simply because that's how I understand what I've read by him so far, not a sign of my wish to defend certain monstres sacrees of anarchism. As for the theory of rackets, I already explained to mciver why I think it's useless; kindly refer to that passage, and if you disagree with me, let me know why.

Obviously there must be a conscious commitment to communism for at least a significant percentage of the working class, for there to be even a glimpse of a possible communist society. Obviously as with everything, this is a process and there will be no instant 6 billion communists.
Let me ask you this however: if communism is not feasible as long as it depends on a large group of people becoming communists, in what sense is it feasible at all?

Sounds very moralistic to speak of "bad faith". Yes all groups inevitably reproduce capitalist relations to some extent, and just as in capitalism some people take advantage to the detriment of other people, so it is with these political groups. Is there a "theory of bosses", a "theory of scabs"? No, and there is no need for one, because these things are already covered by the "theory of class society" as formulated by Marx and others.

I agree that such a disclaimer would technically be honest and accurate, but it would also be confusing for people who are perhaps not coming to these groups with a solid understanding of what "the determinations and mediations" of capital are. So it could just as well sound like "we are a capitalist organization pretending to be against capital." Rather than being advertised in its title, such an issue could be discussed at length by all members of the group; I think that would be equally useful and no less honest.

The re-imposition of capitalist production in a number of historical revolutionary contexts has a number of explanations and cannot simply be rationalized as an inevitable consequence of "racketism."
Organizations are not just "capitalist relations" just as individuals are not just "capitalist relations" (if they were then surely there would be no possibility whatsoever, not even theoretical, of ever overthrowing capital).
I think the "theory of rackets" (as I understand it right now) is misleading because it tends to explain particular historical events in terms of an ahistorical "organizational practice" that doesn't add to our understanding of why revolutions failed in the past.
The Russian Revolution succumbed for different reasons than the one in Spain (although obviously there was a common context to some extent), and it wasn't just their respective "revolutionary organizations" that brought about such an outcome.

Obviously these anarchists did not exist in a void where all they had to do was blossom into "what they said they were". Spanish anarchists existed in the context of a vicious war carried by the state machine against the Spanish working classes. If you think this doesn't complicate things immensely, and that it's just the "rackets" what ruined everything, then I think you are mistaken.

.

good one

The critique developed by Camatte of what I will call ‘organisatlionalism’ was not of his divising but only the theoretical culmination, or simply a reflection or summary, of what many others also experienced during a period where class struggle became more overtly politicised. He was responding to a situation where the ideas of the many left fragments then active, and for the first time in decades, were connecting to actual lived events within the lives of millions of individuals.

As is to be expected of genuine communists, he did not seek to merely celebrate the form taken by those struggles but rather sought to anticipate and articulate points of weakness... i.e. in particular he focused on the problems that might occur if groupscules gained power within the working class. This is not to say that that was all there was to say on the struggles of the time, or on the elective group form. He was not alone in developing this critique, although it is very convenient for later ‘organisationalists’ (I deliberately do not say racketeers) to isolate him as a ‘primitivist’ and thereby discredit his historically important intervention. The historical isolation of Camatte is a misreading of those times and to their great credit, there were other communists who independantly arrived at similar conclusions: Debord, Vaniegem, the writers of the text Militancy - Highest stage of Alienation, the group Negation, Joe Jacobs amongst others who we do not remember. All of these made critical interventions on the simple forms the workers’ movement was adopting... not because they were running dog lackeys but because it is the role of communists to criticise exisitng forms rather than advocate them.

On the side issue of primitivism itself... I think there remains something to say on it and I hope to start a thread on it in the next week or so (or perhaps someone else would be kind enough to do that) but in the case of Camatte, let us remember his actual theorisation of the events of the time so we can better understand his theory of ‘domestication’ (which like ‘racket’, is an unfortunate term that has echoed down the decades).

It was Camatte’s understanding that the working class had passed into a stage of ‘real subsumption’ and its forms thereby merely replicated capitalist relations without establishing any external opposition to it – he concluded that the apparent antagonism of class was actually the motor of capitalist reproduction (I should say here that these arguments were grounded in a perfectly coherent and text-based reading of Capital).

He then went on to investigate where oppositional subjective forms capable of overcoming capitalism might be developing... these forms (which we might call, immediatist) were defined by their attempts to autonomously impose conditions of live activity (as opposed to the effects of accumulated dead labour) and were later termed ‘primitivism’. In other words ‘primitivism’ is the proletariat’s attempt under capitalist conditions to immeidately realise live activity and re-skill itself... if this undertaking was in error (and I think we all think it is) then it was an error of the same magnitude of ‘workers’ councils’ as a productivist solution. In other words it articulated part of the problem (in the case of primitivism alienation, in the case of councilism, the organisation of mass society) but did not access the generality of communist relations.

I think most communists probably agree that Camatte was mistaken in his conclusions concerning the subsumption of the working class but only for a certain mindset are his findings insulting and worthy of uncomprehending denunciation. For the rest of us, his ideas, and the framework by which he generated them, remain of interest because they are still useful (even if they are not completely ‘correct’).

We should be mature enough to grant to to Camatte that he ‘needed’ to adopt the theological apparatus of ‘primitivism’ in order to gnerate the insights that he did in other areas. Having said that, it could also be that others might replicate his findings and further develop his thoughts.

In general, on the question of calling names and labelling the ideas of others as they would not necessarily label themselves. It should be remembered that the point is to develop and put into the hands of other human beings the tools that will aid in their own liberation. The point is not to get these others to simply parrot the same principles as us. The point in making arguments is not to denounce the other but to release the truth from their errors. The point is that we must take care that we do not become the opposite of what we are arguing for even as we argue for it. Camatte is not some devil and nor is it appropriate to dehumanise your self or your cause by portraying him as such. Where we disagree we must make our own arguments in our own terms without fear of whether this fits in with our organisation’s official policy – this disagreement, or critique, the breaking with orthodoxy, is the method of communist thought.

Of more interest (to me at least) than denunciation and counter-denunciation, is the question of how the ideas of those communist individuals who break from established organisations are then communicated... where there is no organised ‘tradition’ who in the communist milieu is going to have an open enough mind to remember and engage with their work (and how) for the benefit of the proletariat? For example, if Camatte is remembered only as a primitivist then the injury is not to him but to the interest of the working class in its struggle to abolish itself (which was the interest which Camatte attempted to advance) because it will no longer have access to his ideas.

That was in reference to Postone et al, not you or any other member; nice twist though.

I have been called that, yes.

Yeah I think it does; it's an honest question. If you don't want to answer it fine but don't give me this hissy fit crap about how I insulted you with my "inquistorial" rudeness.

Nothing is incorporated into the question. It is an actual question. A lot of people in this thread have made a point out of acting the sceptic, starting with mciver, who has made some good points I might add, and I'm just curious to know what the sceptics subscribe to. So to whose left are you and why?

I know m'lud; for someone of your stature to descend to this level...unforgiveable!

As if the anarchists did not capitalise politically on the death of Alexandros Grigoropoulos.

The rationalisations and misdirections that have followed these murders are an interesting example of gang (or racket) consciousness at work. The murders themselves also demonstrate how the modus operandi of the Greek anarchists, excepting on an ideological level, is indistinguishable from that of the fascists (and is thus equally expressive of the ‘politics’ that is generated and contained by present circumstances): each phalanx is built on extreme mystified loyalty to the group; each deploys the same macho techniques of intimidation, insurrection, confrontation; both externalise blame and invariably identify others as being ‘responsible’; both generate a milieu of intellectual sympathisers to contextualise and rationalise their atrocities; both tend towards a form of mysticism of ideals in place of critique; both focus their critique on finance capital; both are incapable of analysing how their role feeds into the spectacle, how they still belong to capital even as they seemingly oppose it; it is also highly likely that the street level membership of both factions drift between the gangs. And most importantly, both factions fail to recognise their mutual similarities and how they are of exactly the same order of determination with regard to the social relation. Murder is what happens during extreme social upheavals and this is not a more tragic event than any other three avoidable deaths that ocurred in the world yesterday. But nonetheless, three workers were burnt to death by anarchists and that needs to be internalised and engaged with if pro-revolutionaries are not to remain mere agents of social disfunction, tragically acting out inescapable traumas like any other form of gang criminality. The worst prospect for the anarchists is that the more they escalate and rationalise their militaristic approach in opposing capital the more they come to resemble fascists, and the more likely it is that their actions will feed into some form of fascist coup.

Maybe it was worth responding to Taxikipali's post on the thread he/she posted it in, rather than on this one.

One of the things interesting about what you are saying here is that my understanding of the Greek movement/scene is that the 'anti-organisational' tendency in anarchism is predominant there, and that attempts to co-ordinate activity through membership organisations there are viewed with a lot of suspicion. I'm not familiar with Cammatte's arguments, but if he criticises political organisations rather than political ideas for their racketeering, is the situation in Greece a good illustration of his arguments?

There are points in your post which seem valid, but with my knowledge of the anarchist movement in Greece coming from English language reports, is there any factual basis to some of your claims here - for example the idea that there's significant driftage between the ranks of the anarchists and fascists, or that anarchists might be part of a military coup in Greece. We also don't know at this stage whether these people were killed by anarchists its a possibility but they've been falsely blamed in a similar incident in the past.

Its also worth noting that there are attempts to "internalise and engage" with the problems of the anarchist movement in Greece - you've quoted Taxikipali above but ignored the criticism he/she has made of the macho streetfighting mentality in the anarchist scene which make these kinds of tragedies a real risk. There's also this, which has been circulated via the After the Greek Riots blog.

I also think you are overstating your point here - if the anarchists are just like fascists because they have a poor critique of the spectacle, "invariably identify others as being ‘responsible’", etc, then so is pretty much everyone on the planet who has some sort of political perspective on the world they live in, with the exception of a tiny milieu within the tiny ultra-left milieu. They might be criticisms worth making, they might not, but "they're just like fascists" looks like Godwin's law.

After reading through the comments on this thread, there's a question worth raising - how is the kind of fetishisation which political organisations face different to the kind of fetishisation we all face, communist theorists included? In short, if all communist groupings and political organisations are invariably 'capitalist' in nature, because of the way consciousness is rooted in material circumtances, how are polical arguments, texts, etc. of any kind not subject to the same pitfalls?

Take an argument like this for example:

I mean all thought, analysis and reflection in the here and now is a product of capitlist conditions, and cannot set itself outside of the fetishised conditions of life under capitalism. Surely that problem is as inescable in the most advanced communist critique of organisational practice as it is in anywhere else.

Plus, it'd be easy enough to argue that its having your cake and eating it to say that on the one hand the method of communist thought is critique of everthing that exists, but that the problem with 'rackets' is their view of rival groups of competitors - which would be manifested in practice as the critique of other groups.

Thank you for your excellent comments. I am okay with everything you say... the point for communists is to present the problem to the working class, which must be resolved at a 'higher' level of recursivity than that at which communists operate, i.e. the bind must be released by the practice of the class. I think communists crystallise or embody theoretical problem, in this way they reverse the 'organisationalist' relation by which the 'party' brings meaning to the proletariat. I think it is the proletariat that brings meaning to the communists.

My only points of difference with you are:

a. on Godwin's law; it is the greek anarchists who fetishise 'their' struggle against fascists not me, this is the background 'turf war' to current events – but there is a real problem in the critique of finanace, the IMF and other 'external' enemies. I do not have facts about interchangeability of memberships except to say that this is what happens in gang warfare and historically certain forms of anarchism have drifted into fascism. My point was that the technique of the anarchists at that point was indistinguishable from that used in communal, ethnic, religious wars. I regret the comment on fascist coups, upon consideration I should say, such acts have separated the anarchists from the wider working class... (and yet this is an ambiguous outcome, as it allows the anarchists to reengage with who and what they are). Overall, I do not think we should be over-concerned with attribution (Greece is the country of N17 after all) but rather should focus on how the anarchists fed their interventions into the spectacle of Greek politics... they are permitted a space (not allowed in other European countries) which they inhabit, the problem is this relation between what is permitted and what then takes place.

b. yes, the greek milieu is dominated by insurrectionists, a tendency which critically minded communists are ambivalent about because of its focus on radical subjectivity as an end in itself. However, the implication that informality generates more informal tyrannies than membership organisations doesn't hold... there is constant tendency within all instituted and non-instituted relationships towards informal tyranny. Again, we are presented with a 'problem' which we should not rush to close or exteriorise.

c. I meant no sleight against Taxikipali in not replying on the other thread, I just thought it illustrated certain issues with 'gangs and rackets' which were under discussion here.

Again, thanks for your very useful summing up of the last few pages of this thread... you mentioned 'purism' or the ultra-ultra left, you might want to develop that further as it kind of brings this discussion back to the core of this thread and where 'invariance' should appropriately appear within communist thought.

I didn't really address this. I don't have an answer, as I said above, the proper means of addressing the problem is to present the determination accurately (i.e. we are a formation of capital struggling against it) in the hope that external others will be able to release the bind. This after all is the honest representation of the truth of the relation between the small group and the proletariat, only they can release us all from the problems that we have articulated.

They and us are part of the same process: arn't they? The effort of communist to develop organisations is an expression of the proletariat trying to arm itself with political organisations.

As far as I can tell, capitalist society presents the problem to the working class every day. Why should anyone just spend their time showing the contradictions that are already screaming at people in their daily lives? Still, Forte's approach here comes naturally from his basic positions - communists somehow operate at a lower level or other than the undifferentiated working class.

I think Django hits the nail on the head here and it's pretty simple.

The Camette/gangs/etc line either must claim nothing is possible or must claim that conscious/organized communists become specially tainted in some weird way that stands in their way of creating conscious communist practice.

My guess here is at least the appeal of this view that comes down more to a psychology of self-hate than to any very logically defensible position. And self-hate can have a big audience - probably a good fraction of the would-be-Avant-garde. And this appeal increases when our enterprising anti-organizationalists tie their self-hate to a variety of sophisms from the philosophy's grab bag, from Russell's paradox to Zeno's paradox.

One certainly should grapple with the structural problems inherent in attempting to realize one's conscious intent. This is not a small problem, not an insoluble problem but also not a problem that we can expect some undifferentiated other to solve for us later. This problem is endemic to civilized society. As Marx or the Buddha roughly formulated it; the results of people's acting go beyond their intention and war plans don't last the first a battle. Certainly this an important problem for we conscious communists but also will be a problem for any collective would-be communist practice, is even a problem for the capitalist ruling class maintaining itself, and will be a problem for even a communist world maintaining itself. Collective action involves the failure of individual intentions.

the problem here is an absolute separation of "communists" from "the class", as if we're not workers. the thing is (for the most part), we are. thus the 'problem' of capital is one we face day to day, whether through shit at work, crap from landlords or other problems arising from alienated society (racial/gendered violence, depression...). organisation then should serve the purpose of aiding communist workers to engage in the process of organisation against said conditions, which of course we can't do on behalf of the wider class but as a part of it (that is to say, with our workmates, fellow tennants etc).

The organisation question is pretty fundamental, and those who think organising an organisation helps towards self-organisation (their own, that of specific struggles and that of a revolutionary movement as a whole) are stuck in the perspectives of the old workers' movement, with all its confict within itself and with its image for others. This was pushed to the extreme by Stalin's, and all the other Leninists', need to present a revolutionary image with their ideology of the collective opposed to the false choice of bourgeois individualism, which in fact was used to crush all individual desires, initiative and critique on the part of individual proletarians (and in the case of the Bolsheviks after Lenin's death, ended up forcing the silence of individual leading Bolsheviks in the name of the image of the Party...Trotsky's wilful silence about Lenin' testament warning the party about Stalin is just one example of the submission of individuals to collectivist ideology).

In 1977, in response to various confusions about the organisational question in France, Daniel Denevert, a situationist, wrote this as a draft text which never got published; nevertheless I reproduce it here because, although it tends towards an excessive reactive attitude to collectivist pro-organisational ideology and towards a kind of 'proletarian' inidividualism, it still has some significant pertinence to the critique of rackets:

I'm certainly not going to defend all of this, but I think it can usefully contribute to the debate on this thread, which has thankfully gone beyond the uninteresting limits of its title.

PS
For information's sake re. the above: the CRQS was a very small group (4 individuals - including, obviously, Denevert) based in Paris; CRQS stands for - in English - The Centre For Research Into The Social Question.