Communism is fun, I did communism today. Not-the-present-state-of-things was quite fun. »Such profanity!« you may think, dear reader. Communism is mine and I came to share. I will not surrender it to phantasms of economy and political definitions.
May a frame to provide home to such outrageous claims be offered:
What is capitalism's greatest invention? What is his most effective commodity? It is anti-capitalism. Mark Fisher has addressed in detail the question of how postcapitalist desire is recuperated by capitalism. "What if, in short, the desire for Starbucks is the expected desire for communism?" (M. Fisher, Postcapitalist desire). Anti-capitalism is the most concentrated form of post-capitalist desire. For its production, capitalism even dares to intensify the base for post-capitalist desire; the totality of capitalism knows no boundaries. Our minds are capitalist, and so are our bodies. Humanity is the shadow of capitalism and capitalism is the shadow of humanity. Ouroborous. And all for a good price. And what does total capitalism give us? Is it not our wage to receive leisure from ideas and experiences of the human, healthy and organic (those lie in the corner like tasteless postcards)? We are paid in posthumanism. Our (((self)-)+)exploitation has certainly cost us a lot. Posthumanism is the reward for this. For our work on us and against us. What is taken from us is sold to us, sometimes in a corrupted state as a compensation for the trouble. (And often we ourselves are the dealers who make commodified offers of freedom attractive to us). But here too, money is time. Working hours. Anti-capitalism offers job opportunities. “Sell the present, invest your time in the future and you will get what you are missing or destroy what you are.” Isn’t that a reproduction of capitalist labor? Liberation is postponed to an apocalypse of redemption, whose simplest imitations are already received with joy.
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Some want paradise, others want a cure for the capitalism within themselves. Everything I have discussed so far has already bought into capitalism on some level. Capital as our disgust, our self-hatred, recognizes the miniaturization that surrounds us: "very soon everyone will become his own mini-instrument of repression, his own school, his own army. The super-ego will invade everything." (F. Guattari, Anti-Psychiatry and Anti-Psychoanalysis). And so it was. Everyone also became their own economy: It should be considered to what extent being proletarian means being at least to some extent bourgeois.
However, miniturized, total capitalism gives us an advantage:
Capitalism is our everyday life, our boredom, our stress, our overwork, our depression, our narcissism, no longer just a constellation of productivity and property rights. The latter has always been irrelevant anyway. What has always been crucial is the alienation, the suffering, the hunger and the deprivation. The reification of time used to be consequence of such constenllations though. The workplace is meant to be omnipresent.
The scepter of the anti-capitalist remedy, the absence of which constantly renews, strengthens, reproduces and produces our illness, can come to an end, starting from here: Let's take a strawman. »Neoliberalism/capitalism is whatever I dislike or more precisely capitalism is dismay.« Yes, that's exactly how it is! O strawman, be my weatherman! On a more serious note - we shouldn’t reproduce the strawyness of the poor strawman. That would miss the point. Let’s turn it around: »Whenever I am not involved with what I dislike, whenever my dislike is occupying me, it’s communism.« Communism seeing a depressive episode gone. Let’s talk about communist episodes! Pretending that communism is less commonplace, less achievable, but an apocalyptic good that we cannot produce ourselves simply spoils the present.To call this micro-communism, ego-communism anything other than communism misses the beautiful potential to undo the power of a phantom.
If we give ourselves the chance to allow ourselves not to tie our joy to apocalyptic liberation, we have a little more opportunity to see the bubbles of communism.
These bubbles are worlds, not temporary islands because they evade the time structure of capitalism and modernity and refuse to produce them. They don't pass, but they can break. They can be defended or abandoned. The truth of capitalism comes in two steps: being dragged into it (1) and not venturing out (2). Capitalism teaches us to build a house without a door. The walls are made of fog, but we think of it as concrete. They are the kind of outsideness that no longer exists as such to us when we are in it. Is it possible for us to constantly reach such a state anytime and under all conditions purely out of egoist revolt? Probably not, but a holy communism that puts us in the shackles of capitalism greatly worsens the potential. Time consciousness as a parallel to class consciousness is relevant here: It is not only important to abolish one's own class confinement, but also to cast off the temporal bindings. The art of preserving such communist moments requires learning from post-anarchism, but this is a story for another day. One thing is certain: I can carry communism within me and in my everyday life, far removed from the present state of things that is constantly being sold to us, as I manage to abolish them for myself. People can also be communists together, maybe even lead each other more easily into communism and ensure that their communism doesn't burst. Communism among us!