Meaning of communism I would like to articulate. Not only would private property be abolished, but the propriety of the self with respect to itself, its powers, its autonomy, its ‘ontological tumescence’ (Levinas). Profound insight of Levinas’s philosophy: that place where I am, the place from which I speak and take to be mine, is already an usurpation. Pascal was right: mine is the place in the sun – the great evil of the world begins in that assertion. Doesn’t Bataille indicate the same when he writes about laughter? Or Deleuze about immanence?
I won’t present an argument here. Still, when Marx and Engels insist that communism is not an ideal but real, when they claim it is something which begins through strategic negotiation here and now, today, it is to those experiences which break from the molar form of the worker to which they point. Work, identification: the labour which permits you to carve out a place in a world, to make a home for yourself, to set yourself back from the elements, to pull a roof over your head – this same labour has as its price a terrible usurpation.
What is to be done? There is no room for good conscience, that first of all. And no room for that great elevation which would allow you to become the judge of all, surveyor of the field, like Zeus above the battlefield. Yes, it is necessary to judge, to act, but this is local, provisional – it begins in the middle as Deleuze likes to say. It begins as soon as you are there, which is to say, straightaway. Politics is there first of all – yes, everything is political however bland and indefensible this sounds. Your self-relation is political. Relation itself is political. What matters is to bind relations to the great struggle, to understand its implication in the great struggle for the world. For the world – yes, to call forth the virtuality of this world – the great potencies which work against the molar form of work.
Meaning of communism: affirmation of the being-together which answers to the usurpation that has always occurred. This recalls the communism to which Marx will sometimes allude: non-fetishised relation to nature, non-fixity of social roles: all of this is announced in the laughter which bursts contagiously across you and others. Announced there, though it has hardly begun. Laughter reaches you from the day after the revolution – that impossible day in which we will live without a place to occupy. That impossible day from which we live today: place without place, u-topia.
Lars Iyer's Blog 