Stop Me Before I Vote Again

SMBIVA's own dear comrade, Uncle Al Moray Shutzmien, the generalissimo of all well-patterned iron filings, recently buried this link inside one of his devilishly sincere auto-buffets. I thought it deserved a fuller broader more prominent venue.

The dateline appears to be April 1, 2009. If you think I'm aiding in a hoax here... well... so be it!

"Today the anarchist space in my city got a package in the mail from Mexico. It came with a flat, cardboardesque peanut butter cookie and a letter stating that the cookie was made from the stolen remains of Leon Trotsky.

It came with the following letter, translated from Spanish, reproduced here exactly as it was written:

To whom it may concern,

The cookies that you have in their hands contain in them the current remainders of Leon Trotsky, Bureaucracy Grandfather Toad. They were taken in 20 of March 2009 -- almost the anniversary of the suppression of the rebelion of Krondstadt -- by a robbery launched on its museum in the City of Mexico, D.F.

For some, these remainders are sacred. They are the physical remainders of a revolutionary martyr who incorporate the idea of a proletarian fight of the masses toward a forumlaic triumph and historic determined. For other, these remainders are profane. They are the remainders of a murderer, burocrat, and usurper of authentic rebellion. The two perspectives, nevertheless, they share the museum as a standard of value, the only question being whether Trotsky deserves display.

Everything that enter to museums are frozen and without life, transformed to dead objects that raise up and against us. To get, to bake, and to consume Trotsky as cookie, we are acting with history on our terms. We give life to the lifeless along with the fights and tensions incorporated inside. We are Gods. If Trotsky, however, was correct about history, then the fact that his remainders are now dessert was written in the fabric of the October Revolucion, and we are the only messengers.

The holy communion has served as a spiritual nourishment for the expresion of obedience to the God consumed. Alternative, the consumption of the flesh of an enemy has been seen like the method of absorbing the force of an adversary. In the two interpretations, nevertheless, the final resting place is in shit. We do not want to venerate this God or to absorb its power. To consume these cookies is not to free us of the legacy of Trotsky, but to affirm our superiority over the dead things that to dominate us. When the dead enslave us by acting as the historic artifacts of ideology, we would prefer that they are appropriated by the hostile forces of our imagination and become in desserts.

We are keeping a few cookies with us. Whoever that assaults the next museum, whoever that throw the next bullet to history, whoever rekindles the rebellions that give us life -- we will send them one. Good luck."

Enter Slubniakoff Zizek:

"...one should avoid the temptation to react to the ongoing financial crisis with a retreat to fully sovereign nation-states, easy prey for free-floating international capital, which can play one state against the other. More than ever, the reply to every crisis should be more internationalist and universalist than the universality of global capital."

Exercising the soveign powers of the nation state is a "retreat"? Remember, this is aimed at advanced Euro societies now, not Nepal. In fact, the full use of national credit systems alone, once decoupled from the international network, is well able to remove the nasty outcome Ziz raises -- "easy prey for free floating international capital."

Guru Zizoomski wants us to believe that such an essay in updated national liberation exacerbates transnational corporate exploitation and manipulation. In his cutting-edge conception of class struggle he becomes an "objective" shill for the multinational corporate regime!

Obviously, it's only as part of the MNCs' network that "international capital" can really "play one state against another." The collective "instinct" to throw off the transnational corporate drag nets is not untutored folly, it's sound as hell.

Break free, brothers and sisters! Slam shut the import doors! No more free entry, no more global capital inflows! Build national economic self-reliance, energy independence, an autonomous financia system! Inaugurate a massive reindustrialization policy, reconstruct your national production platform, become a greenhouse called Eden. All this is as plain as the nose on Sarko's face.

These are the concrete forms of the present class struggle in Europe and this wizard wants the Euro job class to disdain them as a cul de sac, in fact worse than a cul de sac, a form of capitulation to the existing social formation.

So why would our man here reject this intuitively obvious broadly shared project? I suspect primarily it's his learned ignorance, his ethereal roaming among the groves of pink humanist letters. Above all, it's about a pigeon-like incomprehension of the self-developing, self-transforming possibilities of any modern "national" economy.

As a consequence here he is imploring the jobblin' frogs of Europe to keep their ever more heated national pots right over the international fire, foreswear the reform struggles, and instead create liberated spaces of the social "mind".

To me this amounts to saying "just swim faster comrades, round and round the pot. Motion alone will set you free. The impossible happens. To act as if you are free is to be free."

Maybe I'm being a tad unfair, but if so then what acts -- what concrete acts -- does Ziltchnikoff have in mind?

He paraphrases a fellow left sage: "Building free domains at a distance from state power, subtracted from its reign (like the early Solidarnosc in Poland), and only resisting by force state attempts to crush and re-appropriate these ‘liberated zones’" Hmm, what might that mean, here and now? But nope, that don't cut it anyway. Sez Doctor Z: "Today we do not know what we have to do, but we have to act now."

Sounds like fun, eh? Liberation as a naked act of leaping into the unknown, looking to perform the impossible. Okay, that might sound absurd, but it is an act after all -- right? Do not go quietly into that badass night.

For Zibzack, seems an act -- a system-transgressive act, one must presume -- is, yes, just an act. But it's more than an act sometimes, too. Sometimes at the same time its acting leaps the actor and creates its own preconditions. Sorta like in a time-machine movie.

We have learned a great deal from the last century of class struggle. One thing seems quite obvious to me: the unit of liberation is the nation, and the arena of struggle is the movements now that objectively batter the corporate hegemon, not some abstract locationless free domain Shangri-La of the collective mind, kept distant from the state by not really existing at all.

I agree with Zizek and just about all other red hot rad thinksters: the destruction of the existing state -- no matter its form democratic or otherwise -- is the necessary first step toward true societal sublation(*). But revolution is not just around every corner. Part of Clio's righteous work is the day to day battles within the confines of the existing institutions.

The mass battle against "international Yankee led capital" today in Europe means, among much else, the breakup of the euro zone and the restoration of full financial sovereignty to its nation-state members. If that seems hideously sub-revolutionary, so be it. Hold your nose and dive in, or find yourself a self-liberated freeform activated isolate operating a safe distance from the state, and of course from the concrete movements that right now are making tomorrow out of today.

Among other aquisitions we now have the discoveries of modern political economy, and more particularly the technical know-how to sublate much more of market earth's perennial contradictions. Like a hundred thousand clones of Perseus, with these gifts let us charge forward to destroy the transnational Cetus ravaging every coast on the planet.

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(*) Even here I disagree completely with Dr Ziz -- the sublation only has possibility if the collapse of the old regime is followed quickly enough by the erection of a revolutionary party-led prole dictatorship, a class dictatorship prepared to forcefully transform the existing rubble of the old society into the structures of the new.