Unlike apologists for capitalist social relations, communudists have no desire to exalt the superiority of ‘modern man’ over his primitive forebears. On the contrary, communudists intuitively understand the ‘grandeur’ of primitive man and see in the society of the future a restoration, albeit on a higher level, of the primitive communism of the classless societies of the past.

Communudists know that anyone who wishes to be consistent in their opposition to capitalism must necessarily re-appropriate the types of consciousness that emerged from primitive communities, as well as their social form. Since the primitive community is a true community, a society without exploitation, in which production is still geared towards the satisfaction of human needs, it follows that a large part of the material resources of these societies were directed not simply towards the immediate struggle for existence but rather into activities that were enjoyed simply for their own sake. Work was suspended and life became play. The remorseless necessity to direct activity towards some future goal was replaced by pursuits without pre-determined ends. The tyranny of time was suspended and instead everybody found themselves transported into an ecstatic present.

Below we're publishing 2 texts: 2012 "Communisation Theory and the Question of Fascism" by cherry angioma, along 1990s one "Do Men Exist?" by NOT the Red Menace - are reproduced as a follow up to the discussion held at Alytus Psycho De-colonization Conference in September 21st - 22nd, 2012 and reported in part at: 

http://4.alytusbiennial.com/news/556-damtp-alytus-meeting-report-a-reflections.html


http://4.alytusbiennial.com/news/555-oppression-is-not-a-simple-matter-directed-as-reaction-to-alytus-meeting.html

It is now more than five years since the start of the financial crisis with no sign of respite from austerity and increasing insecurity.  Neither the old left of unions and parties or the newer social movements of protest and direct action seem to be up to the task of offering a way forward. In the search for new road maps to navigate crisis and the possibilities of life beyond capitalism, the concept of ‘communisation’ has become an increasing focus of discussion.

The word itself has been around since the early days of the communist movement. The English utopian Goodwyn Barmby, credited with the being the first person to use the term communist in the English language, wrote a text as early as 1841 entitled ‘The Outlines of Communism, Associality and Communisation’.  He conceived of the four ages of humanity as being ‘ ’Paradisation, Barbarization, Civilization and Communisation’, while his wife and collaborator Catherine Barmby anticipated current debates about gender with early feminist interventions arguing for communisation as a solution to women’s subordination (Goodwyn Barmby is discussed in Peter Linebaugh, ‘Meandering on the semantical-historical paths of communism and commons’, The Commoner, December 2010).

The Barmbys’ use of the term to describe the process of the creation of a communist society is not a million miles away from its current usage, but it has acquired a more specific set of meanings since the early 1970s when elements of the French ‘ultra-left’ began deploying it as a way of critiquing traditional conceptions of revolution. Communism has often been conceived of by both Marxists and anarchists as a future state of society to be achieved in the distant future long after the messy business of revolution has been sorted out.  For advocates of communisation on the other hand, capitalism can only be abolished by the immediate creation of different relations between people, such as the free distribution of goods and the creation of ‘communal, moneyless, profitless, Stateless, forms of life. The process will take time to be completed, but it will start at the beginning of the revolution, which will not create the preconditions of communism: it will create communism’ (Gilles Dauvé & Karl Nesic, ‘Communisation’, 2011).

Today this broad notion of communisation is used in various different ways, but arguably there are two main poles in current debates – albeit with many shades in between.

In a way very similar, yet different - to the construction of moving structures proposed by Ricardo - my proposal for a few day workshop at Nepokorennye studios was to explore the possibilities of other kind of material that could be put to work in the public realm – namely digital texts used for email spamming.

 

While Ricardo has a passion for spectacular technology, on my behalf I invited the participants of OKK-led workshops to try out the practice of Psychic Spam Attacks. Having tactically played around with re-writing and re-sending spam e-mails from my own mailbox, I was glad to share the experience of the initiative entitled POLARIS INTERNATIONAL Limited (in which I was myself involved), and give advice, as well as provide the spam text material to the workshop participants. In order to bring these kind of Opinion Props to the public realm, some form of identity would be "created" - at least in the form of an e-mail address.

 

We would draw on the rich history of multiple identity creation in order to question the fundamentals of the bourgeois society - all kind of separations including the one of "high" (namely art) and "low" culture, singular identity, and the capitalist logic of value creation.