with

Last words before the gathering

Politics – Non-Politics – Ehtics

and in the appendix:

Moses Dobruška: How it all began: The Strasbourg Theses

Michele Garau: The Strategy of Separation (no english translation available)

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen: The Movement of Refusal

Bulletin No. 5 (as pdf)

Politics – Non-Politics – Ethics

Well, the situation is simple and depressing at the same time: on the one hand, we are experiencing an unparalleled authoritarian formation, war as a means of politics that is getting closer and closer to us, unbelievable racialisation and the rise of an ecological accumulation regime. Far into the left, we often experience not opposition, but a voluntary servitude that makes these processes possible in the first place.
To such an extent that the left basically no longer exists and, in any case, the uprisings and contradictions against the devastated reality can be found in completely different places. Is this the end of politics as an attempt to shape society and history? Not that you misunderstand us: We do not understand this attempt in the sense of a liberal, democratic model of negotiation. It was never like that. Even the polis could only present its negotiation processes as civilisation by excluding the barbarians. But politics no longer even seems to exist as class struggle, not even as angry opposition to those in power. Only as rage against reality, as a dystopian revolt that never reaches the point of interruption. But let’s not first ask about our place in the revolts, that would be an old, left-wing question. Let’s ask about our place in the world.

Where do we want to fight?

As those who live at the center of power but want to overthrow it? The barbarians were the excluded within the Roman Empire and the excluded at the edges of the empire. Is it necessary to seek out one of these places, to become barbarians in the confrontation with a civilization that is more totalizing than ever before? But where are these places? Is the place of politics already given, are they the places where power meets rage? Are they the places of symbolic confrontation on the street, in the factories of world destruction, in the places of the supposed conspiracy of domination? Or do we only find these places when we no longer claim to know where they are and who meets in these places? Are they places that can be reached, or that lie completely out of reach on the other side of the world, and which we could or should nevertheless make our places?

How do we want to fight?

There are those who no longer describe the forms of struggle of the future as politics, but as an ‘ethical continuity’. They see the revolutionary emergence in the development of an ethics that empowers us to smash power in every action, no matter how quotidian, and to create a non-powerful togetherness. Such a politics of ethical grounding, of ‘human complicity’, as the Conspirationist Manifesto quotes the Zapatistas, could become the counter-form to a cybernetic supremacy of domination that understands us as pure information and wants to dominate us with the means of mathematisation, of algorithms. Such politics can also be understood as destitution, i.e. the unseating of power through the emergence of a completely different form of life. However, we are talking here about an understanding of a form of life that would determine all of life and could by no means be limited to niche existences etc. Destruction and construction go hand in hand with it, also in the form of uprisings. Nevertheless, it should not be confused with the proposal of insurrectionalism, which understands politics as the self-organisation of affinity groups in the face of an event. Not least the question of the party is answered differently by these two proposals. And then there are the non-movements, the namesake of this congress. Even less strategic than the two previous forms of revolt and revolution, they are the description of a phenomenon of our time. Whether the gilets jaunes, the revolt in Chile or the George Floyd protests: the revolts of our time are devoid of any logic of representation and classical organisation. In them, a re-composition or re-finding of the identities atomised by neoliberal capitalism is taking place, what Endnotes calls the confusion of identities in its text ‘Onward Barbarians’¹. These identities come together on the basis of a shared experience (hunger, police violence, marginalisation, disregard, …) that bursts the boundaries of their respective identities and at the same time remain within the same frame of reference. In this sense, they highlight the crisis of legitimacy and representation (such as the decline of the working class since the 1970s, whose lack of identification potential also points to the decline of the associated economic conditions) and at the same time point beyond them without being able to overturn the conditions. It is precisely because they remain bound to the frame of reference of identity that they are subject to its limits: despite the experience of community in struggle, the atomisation of individuals cannot be definitively overcome, and despite the ability to form a negative unity against the state, fragmentation into individuals prevents the development of a positive political force. According to Endnotes, politics vigorously returns in the classical form of hostility and division, and can therefore be no more than the subjective expression of a general disorder of capitalist relations.

So what could politics be?

In the age of governmentality and cybernetically organised capitalism, the question of politics is also a question of infrastructure. Infrastructure of rule or infrastructure of life? We live according to the technological optimism of the 2nd International², one could even say that we live according to the belief in progress of modernity. Despite the capitalist excess that we experience on a daily basis, the present is being put on a permanent footing in the face of catastrophe. So we know that we cannot expect salvation from technology in the future. But we cannot live without technology. Which technologies to learn, which to unlearn, which to destroy?
In the face of rule without masters, politics (if we believe we can hold on to this concept without going astray) is also the question of subjectivisation as servants. Attacking power therefore also means attacking ourselves; but how to carry out self-destruction without destroying ourselves? One thing is certain: whatever form of politics, anti-politics or ethics we propose, it must start from ourselves and have ourselves as its goal. But how can we not fall into the trap of moralising politics and lose sight of the global relations of power?

Who do we want to fight with?

If we understand politics as a politics of ethical continuity, as the construction of human continuity, as the destitution of power or a conspiracist uprising, then the question of accomplices in our struggles arises in the same way as the questions about the places of our struggles. The polis, the citizens, never existed, the party and its partisans are history. So we have to go in search of those who represent nothing, who represent no one. Except perhaps their own anger, their own willingness to destitute power and their own imagination, their will to live. So we will not look for any political subject, neither for the proletariat, nor for the precariat. We will not place our hopes in the migrant struggles, nor in the youth. We will have to rely on meeting those who will in these struggles become the ones we are all looking for. It will be a long road.

Revolution and victory

If we move beyond the relationship between constituent and constituted power, if we are not intent on gaining power – be it in the sense of a dictatorship (of the proletariat) or a democracy (of the councils or bourgeoisie) – what remains? And that in a double sense: what remains to be done and what remains of the possible revolution? What does it mean to win?

Perhaps you think we are delusional for asking the question of victory in a situation of historical weakness. But it seems essential to us in order to be able to judge what is right to do. And not least because we still want to win.
Nevertheless, we are faced with a problem: „Making public a revolutionary strategy and not being able to put it into practice, or not formulating it and resigning oneself to presenting findings, analyses, stories.“³ We can do nothing more than make methodological considerations that serve to build forces that are in turn capable of developing, carrying and applying the necessary revolutionary strategies. It is precisely these methodological considerations that we want to make with you. First of all, we want to communicate with you, about ourselves and about the world. Without a common language, there can be no revolt, no uprising, no revolution. Without these, in turn, no common language. Understanding can therefore be no more than an attempt, limited and stumbling perhaps, in which we nevertheless cordially invite you to be part of.