Over the last couple of years my views have changed substantially from what is published in this blog. While I remain a communist, I am no longer invested in “leftism” and its problematics, nor in commitment and belief-based activism. The impetus for this was a growing clarity that the activity of the radical left amounts to little more than symbolic civil participation in liberal democracy, which is objectively to the benefit of liberal and social democratic pro-capitalist forces, and has no capacity to carry through it’s radical aims from theory into effect. Intellectually, the turning point for me was reading the text Nihilist Communism (available here, concisely summarised here, and considerably deepened and extended here), whose analysis I agree with in overall thrust but not in every detail. (I also recommend the texts Militancy: The Highest Stage of Alienation, and Give Up Activism.) At this point, I believe the only possible opening to communism comes through an endogenous breakdown in capitalist reproduction, a la communization theory, which militant activity cannot possibly bring about, and, given the current state-of-play in relation to the suite of ecological crises threatening human survival, continuing to fuck about playing politics within liberal democratic structures is at best a waste of time. At this time I have nothing in particular to add to the existing body of theory around this perspective, and if I did, I feel it would make little sense to consider this a continuation of this blog’s project.
Since undergoing this shift of perspective, it’s been unclear to me what to do with the texts I’ve written for this blog. I’ve been intermittently hiding and unhiding this blog from public view, largely out of embarrassment regarding the naievity of much of what’s put forward here, the transparency of its motivating fantasies, and the general jargon-filled overblown style in which a lot of it is written. But every time I take it down, the next day I have half a dozen “johnnyrando@gmail.com wants to access your blog” messages in my inbox, so clearly someone somewhere cares about this stuff, and it feels necessary to come to some final decision regarding what remains available to the world. The stuff I’ve left up represents texts I no longer agree with but which I feel have some redeeming value, and those that are referenced elsewhere in debates I consider significant and which are left up in the spirit of allowing others to trace the history of those discussion. Some stuff of the latter kind (specifically regarding intersectionality and identity politics) I do not feel I could in good conscience leave in the world, as I feel they directly contribute to destructive and harmful social processes, and this material will remain hidden.
Automatic Writing 