¶Amadeo Bordiga once famously quipped that the worst product of fascism, politically speaking, was anti-fascism. The same could also probably be said of imperialism, only substituting anti-imperialism for anti-fascism. Nothing is worse than anti-fascists who call for communists to bloc with the Democrats in a popular front against the fascist scourge of Trump. Except, maybe, going to some anti-war march to see anti-imperialists waving around placards with Bashar al-Assad’s face on them. So it goes, more or less, down the line: anti-nationalism, anti-Zionism, anti-Stalinism, anti-globalization, etc. While such prefixes may serve as a convenient shorthand indicating opposition to a given feature of the social totality, as part of the overall effort to overcome that totality, to fixate upon one or another facet of capitalist society as the ultimate evil and prioritize it above all others is at once short-sighted and one-sided.
¶We are not anti.
That is to say, we are not against extreme
forms of exploitation, oppression, war, or other horrors. Being
anti
means to choose a particularly unbearable point and
attempt to constitute an alliance against this aspect of the capitalist
Real.
¶Not being anti
does not mean to be a maximalist and proclaim,
without rhyme or reason, that one is for total revolution and that,
short of that, there is only reformism. Rather, it means that when one
opposes capital in a given situation, one doesn’t counterpose to it a
good
capital. A demand, a refusal poses nothing other than what
it is: to struggle against raising the age of retirement is not to
promote the better administration of direct or socialized wages. To
struggle against restructuration is not to be anti-liberal; it is to
oppose these measures here and now, and it is no coincidence that
struggles can surpass themselves in this way. We’re neither anti-this
nor anti-that. Nor are we radical.
We pose the necessity of
communization in the course of immediate struggles because the
non-immediate perspective of communization can serve as the
self-critical analytic frame of struggles, as such, for the historical
production of the overcoming of capital.
¶If anti-liberalism, or at least anti-ultraliberalism – which
currently [2005] constitutes a national union, a nearly total frontism –
furnishes a blinding example of how the anti
approach permits
position within a front, then it is organized along the lines of
Attac
[Association for the Taxation of financial Transactions and
Aid to Citizens] or something more informal. The archetype of this
attitude is anti-fascism: first the ideology of popular fronts in Spain
and France, then the flag uniting the Russo-Anglo-Saxon military
coalition against the Germano-Japanese axis. Anti-fascism had a very
long life, since it was the official ideology of Western democratic
states as well as Eastern socialist states up to the fall of the
[Berlin] Wall in 1989.
¶Besides anti-fascism there was anti-colonialism, an ideology
combining socialism and nationalism within the tripartite world of the
Cold War. This structuring ideology of the aptly-named national
liberation fronts placed the struggles of colonized proletarians
alongside those of local bourgeois elements under the political and
military direction of the autochthonous bureaucratic layers produced by
colonial administrations. Anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism were
also the frame for the alliance of bureaucratic-democratic
revolutionaries with the socialist camp. Such ideologies have then
always functioned as state ideology (existent or constituent) in the
context of confrontations and wars, global and local, between the
different poles of capitalist accumulation. In the metropoles
anti-imperialism was, with anti-fascism, an essential element for
communist parties after the Second World War, presented as the defense
of the socialist fatherland and the peace camp.
It articulated
the conflict-ridden day-to-day management of exploitation with capital
in a global perspective where socialism remained on the offensive.
Anti-imperialism has been, and to a certain extent remains, a framework
of mobilization intrinsically linked to and for war.
¶Anti-racism, brother of anti-fascism, is now another state ideology
which accompanies and absolves the massive and practical state racism
that has developed in France since capital’s entrance into open crisis
in the 1970s. The anti-worker politics of capitalist restructuring
racialized
a set of workers, first by dividing them into
French
and immigrants,
then by further
ethnicization
and so-called communitarianism
[communautarisme]. This situation puts anti-racism in an
untenable position. If it is shown the little blacks
have
displayed racism against the little whites
(just returns which
reap the whirlwind), the anti-racists will have in any case already told
us that this wasn’t racism but social resentment! Marvelous imbecility
that, which thinks racism is biological. It will always be true that
anti-racism holds its own as well as racism without ever putting a stop
to it. During the great struggles of 1995 or 2003, [Jean-Marie] Le Pen
disappeared from the landscape and we barely even remember his
existence. This was not the result of anti-racism.
¶Returning to anti-liberalism: In England and the US, no one hesitates
to call this anti-capitalism. Capitalism
here is understood as
the mere fact of multinational [corporations], whose practical politics
are denounced as strangling the southern countries, destroying their
economies (cf. Argentina) and agriculture in particular, massacring
terrestrial ecosystems, putting workers of the metropoles in competition
with those of emerging
countries, practicing a social
dumping
which precarizes them, flexibilizes them, and makes them
into poor workers. Against such politics one opposes the Tobin Tax, fair
trade, food sovereignty,
guaranteed income, global democratic
regulation, economic solidarity. This is what qualifies the
paraphernalia of anti-liberalism as anti-capitalist. Faced with all
this, what can be said? That true anti-capitalism is something else,
postulating communization? Saying this would obviously be irrelevant,
since in the framework of anti
there is always a race to find the
one true anti. Even more vain that this anti-capitalism is the true
anti-capitalism which federates the front anti-isms have put into
place.
¶Among the antis which circulate we find anti-Zionism, for a while
now. What does it mean? Historically the parties and theoreticians
opposed to Zionism have been Russian, Polish, and Lithuanian workers’
parties and their various leaders: [Leon] Trotsky, [Vladimir] Medem,
[Vladimir] Lenin, and [Rosa] Luxemburg. The struggle against tsarism and
anti-Semitism in the resistance to quotidian exploitation of a miserable
and oppressed Jewish proletariat, regularly the target of pogroms set up
by the secret police, had given birth to two currents in the Jewish
workers’ movement. One was internationalist and autonomist on the
cultural plane (promoting Yiddish), the principle organization of which
was the Bund (Jewish Labor Bund of Russia and Poland) with [Vladimir]
Medem. Despite numerous conflicts and a period of scission, it was
basically the Jewish branch of the Russian Social Democratic Labor
Party. The other current was Zionist, the principal organization of
which was Poale Zion (Workers of Zion) with [Ber] Borochov, founder of
socialist Zionism, who proclaimed that the liberation of the Jews was
impossible in the diaspora and that it was necessary to create a Jewish
socialist state in Palestine. The Bund violently combatted the organs of
Zionist ideology and proclaimed anti-Semitism could only be defeated by
socialism. Simultaneously it charged Zionism with deserting the real
struggle, with promoting an impossible solution that even attacked true
Jewish culture, Yiddish, the culture of a people in the midst of other
peoples in Europe and nowhere else. It is this Jewish opposition to
Zionism that can logically be described as anti-Zionism. Arab opposition
to Jewish colonization in Palestine and the British Mandate is opposed
to this colonization and not really Zionism, which would require
opposing to it another objective responding to the causes that produce
it (as we have seen with the Bund). Thereafter Palestinian nationalist
organizations have refused to call the state of Israel by its name,
qualifying it as the Zionist entity
so as to not recognize an
established fact. This, too, has nothing to do with Zionism. Even if, in
fact, their enemies call themselves Zionists – it’s rather natural for
Palestinians to say they are anti-Zionists – this was a posture that
allowed it to connect (symbolically, after the genocide) up with Jewish
revolutionary movements, and thus claim a position at the same time
anti-colonialist, [a project] of national liberation and
progressivism
adequate to the restructuring of the world by the
Cold War.
¶For that matter, anti-Zionism has become a euphemism for
anti-Semitism, insofar as the denunciation of Israel’s pro-US
imperialist character combines easily with the denunciation of the
dictatorship of the market,
of Wall Street, now center of
liberal globalization,
enemy of the people, within which the
Zionist lobby
is the new name of Jewish international finance. It
is striking to see how, in the context of anti-globalization, the old
anti-Semitic clichés receive a facelift!
¶In either case, we are not more anti-Zionist than anti-imperialist or even anti-war. Opposing the war can, in a specific situation, be the first moment of a proletarian movement overcoming itself in struggle against the capitalist state, which triggers or undertakes a war to maintain itself. But pacifist movements follow the market into war. The world movement against the war in Iraq is the last example.
¶For our part, we aren’t anti-anything. We are pro-communization, which is not to be more radically anti-one thing rather than another – anti-alienation or anti-work, for example.
¶We are pro-communization in the struggles which exist now against the
offensive pursued by capital, against the restructuring which is
presently accomplished but continuously pursued all the same, because
its very specificity is to abolish fixity and therefore remain
definitively unachieved until capital is achieved. We oppose here and
now anti-salary measures. Opposing exploitation and its aggravation is
not anti-capitalism, nor even communizationism
[communisationnisme]. It is to be present in the class
struggle, in the movement of practical and theoretical production of
surpassing. Not in order to say one sole solution, communization,
but to ensure that anti-work politics is posed, even in a very
minoritarian manner, as a necessary consequence of capital and not an
arbitrary choice dictated of the ayatollahs of liberal ideology
(fortunately this necessity more and more audible). Every definition of
a current as anti
prevents its self-seizure as a dynamic element
of surpassing. It is necessary to seize one’s adversary as unable not to
be. Overcoming is one of the courses of the struggle of capital and the
proletariat in their unity; it is the overcoming of the two by the
proletariat. Every anti
definition moves within the antinomies of
capital, since to be anti
is always to promote an
existing opposed element, or what appears to exist as an
immediate potentiality, as alter-globalization
or even
proletarian autonomy. Not only does this not put it in view of an
overcoming, but it poses a strategy (i.e., steps) to arrive at its goal.
Every promotion of an actually existing element operates on the historic
model of the worker program, which affirms class as it is, as well as
work as it is, by asking itself only how much it can be reduced in
putting everyone to work. Now, and this is new, is making certain
aspects of struggle emerge which seem to indicate the sense of
overcoming a promotion of an existing element leading to a strategy?
¶If, in Argentina, the proletarian question is posed even at the heart of what can be qualified as self-management struggles, emphasizing it does not mean promoting an element of this society; it is not then elaborating a strategy. To emphasize the formation of a gap in the counterrevolutionary sealing off of struggles is also part of this gap which indicates overcoming, the existence of a communizing current capable of detecting these elements. The whole course of capital, which currently tends to no longer seal off its cycle in the reproduction of classes, indicates also an overcoming in crisis, and the end of the current cycle of accumulation.
¶To be against is not to be anti.
To struggle against
restructuring that aggravates exploitation is not to be
anti-restructuring, which would mean saying restructuring could
not be pursued. Anti-nuclears prove in a most caricatured
fashion that to be anti
is to promote other existing elements
(other energies, other consumptions), which is totally different than
opposing the construction of reactors and everything that implies:
destruction, militarization of space, and pollution ad vitam
eternum.
¶In the course of struggles we are opposed to anti-capitalism, to anti-fascism, to anti-racism, to anti-Zionism: the essential complements of communitarianism [communautarismes]. But we will not therefore be anti-communitarians [communautaristes], anti-democratic, nor even, and maybe even above all, anti-citizenist*. Opposed to socialization and wanting the abolition of society we are positive, we are only for communism.