Essays and writings in English

of the causality of motion

Why does “We have no country” change its name?

Because it implied something different from its original intention, it had nothing to do with this passage from The Communist Manifesto, I had chosen a name that generated misunderstanding, but the omelette was done:

“The working men have no country [political idealism]. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word [ideological expectation, because in another sense it is contradicted by the historical course in which the proletariat and the bourgeoisie concur to realise a community in the market, in capitalism and thus in the common nation obviously in a different and conflicting sides inside the production of value].“

Let’s be clear, workers have a nation, they determine themselves precisely through the development of the market and within it. Their conflict is within the capitalist mode of production and they reproduce their organization within it, which dominates the proletarian – just as it dominates the capitalist man on a different level – under the necessities to produce goods for the purpose of profit and the accumulation of value in its historical and temporal form of capital. I was referring to a new monster proletariat, where indeed the market robs them of a nation, i.e. a right of citizenship on a formal level. It does not expel them from the market, but it does take away a citizenship from them, but this does not automatically make them a revolutionary subject. And it must be admitted that they are doubly exploited precisely because of this and they fight for that right of citizenship that capitalism denies most of them. They fight to be recognized in their own right as part of the working people who produce. We support them because the counter-altar is the proletarian racism that is determined in the market through the nation community and in which they defend their privilege of whiteness though in conflict with profit. Nonetheless, their need for struggle is a lever – I was and am referring to the immigrants, the racialized, the exploited blacks and bipoc (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour) -, which under certain conditions can be a reflection of the ongoing creaking of real society, which through racism has historically pitted the worker against the colonized coloured peoples, as the George Floyd Rebellion was the unprecedented representation of this sudden momentum before it ebbed away. In fact “we have no country” was not a reprise of that passage from the Manifesto at all. It is a common trait between Marxism and Anarchism to hold that the proletariat in essence has no nation. Yet it can only determine itself on the level of the internal relation to the capitalist mode of production and thus the market. And the market materializes the capitalist nation. Only the causal nexus of the motion of accumulation and its shattering will determine the new to be discovered, now that the development and crisis of the mode of production is presenting its historical account in an accelerated manner in this temporal opening of history that I call “the epoch of the coronavirus”.

“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness” (Karl Marx, For the Critique of Political Economy).

The conditions of life are nothing more than causal links of necessities dependent on the relations of men with the means of production, nature, exchange and reproduction of the species constituted in real society, in a historical movement in finite space and time.

“There is nothing more changeable than human psychology. That’s especially because the psyche of the masses, like Thalatta, the eternal sea, always bears within it every latent possibility: deathly stillness and raging storm, the basest cowardice and the wildest heroism” (Rosa Luxembur, 1917).

Anticipating a ‘programme’ on the basis of past time leads to bitter illusions, because time changes and facts can never repeat themselves in the same way.