coming soon
This blog will probably start becoming active some time in the spring of 2009. Below is our description:
“The investigation is… that which enables any given militant process to continue moving along in the spiral between the various political experiences and their effective theoretical concentration.”
- Bruno Bosteels, “Post-Maoism: Badiou and Politics,” positions: east asia cultures critique, 13(3), 2005, p. 579.
To name our project after a term linked to Mao Zedong could easily be misconstrued, so let us start by clarifying something: We’re not Maoists, or even Marxists, inasmuch as these terms refer to ideologies of state-led modernization, rather than theoretical reflection on the working class’s day-to-day struggles against what has become the chief legacy of such modernization – the global system of capitalist exploitation, with all its accompanying mechanisms of social control. Our struggles against capital, we believe, ultimately tend not toward achieving or improving modernity, but toward abolishing all forms of property and state power, and liberating the earth and human creativity into their cooperative coordination for the good of all. For this movement we reserve the term “communist,” and the theoretical reflection on this movement is only ever partial and experimental. We do no justice to the movement by identifying rigidly with one faction of dead revolutionaries and rejecting all the others as merely “the left wing of capital” and so on. Our task in the present moment is not so much to figure out who among previous theorists was right or wrong, but to draw critically on past theory in analyzing today’s struggles and sharing their lessons among the global working class – employed and unemployed, urban and rural. And these struggles – even those we may be involved with directly – can only be understood through systematic investigation guided by past experience and theory, and motivated by a steadfast commitment to the communist project.
At the time of writing (June 2008), we have mixed feelings about Badiou’s highly abstract theory and its social implications, but we like what we know so far about Colectivo Situaciones, an Argentinian group that has incorporated some of Badiou’s concepts into their practical interventions, and we like the way Shukaitis and Graeber, among others, have also used the term ”militant investigation” in their Constituent Imagination project. Of course many others – including any communists worthy of the name – have done this sort of thing without using this term, for example Kolinko, recently, with their project on call centers, Engels long ago with The Condition of the Working Class in England, and Mao with his numerous rural investigations. If there’s one area where we agree with Mao, it’s in the principle that “people engaged in practical work must at all times keep abreast of changing conditions,” and that ”investigation is especially necessary for those who know theory but do not know the actual conditions, for otherwise they will not be able to link theory with practice” (Rural Surveys, 1941). This blog will be part of a project to help accelerate the spiral between communist theory and practice through investigations into the conditions of ongoing anti-capitalist struggles – especially those in the Chinese-speaking world. As such, this project will also aim to accelerate the spiral between anti-capitalist currents in the Chinese and English-speaking worlds. This is our English blog, aimed at a non-Chinese audience, for reporting and reflecting on the results of such investigations, including onsite observations and interviews as well as reflections on second-hand accounts, overviews of Chinese writings, and criticism of other analyses. In addition to the blog, we also plan a similar Chinese blog; a web archive of relevant writings and other resources in Chinese and English, including pamphlets; a translation and writing project to produce original Chinese pamphlets and possibly a newletter; and eventually, a community center somewhere in mainland China with lectures, workshops, film screenings, and so on. If you’d like to help out with any of these projects, contact us at milivest@hush.com. We are currently based in several locations in the US and mainland China, and we have friends in Taiwan and HK.
