SIC, INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR COMMUNISATION – ISSUE 2
The 2nd issue of Sic (International Journal for Communisation) is out, with texts that attempt to develop new concepts and analyse recent struggles (2011-13): including Occupy Oakland, the riots in the UK and events in Greece and France.
Copies can be ordered here: http://sicjournal.org/en/order-online
Contents:
Not an Editorial
Woland, The Uneven Dynamics of the Era of Riots
Leon de Mattis, Communist Measures
R.S., The Conjuncture
Woland, Rise of the (Non-)Subject
R.S., The Movement Against the French Pension Reform
Rocamadur, The Feral Underclass Hits the Streets
Rust Bunny Collective, Under the Riot Gear
Research & Destroy, Limit Analysis and its Limits
Agents of Chaos, Without You, Not a Single Cog Turns
Excerpts from the non-editorial:
‘Communisation is no longer being perceived as an exotic beast, and it even tends at times to become a fashionable word. Present-day struggles highlight the end of the classical workers’ movement, together with its ambition to take the supposedly good-by-nature core of the economy away from voracious capitalist predators and run it itself. It is almost obvious that the world of our days, matter and soul alike, is the world actually produced by and for capital; that, therefore, workers and their products would have never existed as such if capital had not called them into existence in the first place; that working people’s demands have nowadays become asystemic or, in other words, a scandal akin to high treason; that proletarians are forced to defend their condition against capital but, in this struggle, actions that hurt capital are also actions that tend to call into question the proletarian condition; that communism cannot possibly be conceived as a program to be realised, but only as the historical product of proletariat’s struggle against capital and, at the same token, against its own class belonging; etc., etc. All this is reassuringly easy to show, almost worryingly so in fact.’
‘There is no linear development from present struggles to revolution, but present struggles, even through their limits and impossibilities, are the only anchor of the theory of communisation. The second issue of Sic is decisively focused on a critical appraisal of struggles of varying geographical locations and content; a discussion of communist measures may serve as a theoretical counterpoint; looking into the concept of conjuncture will deal with the necessary leap away from the internal causality chain of capital’s reproduction.’
‘Sic is an international theoretical project, not a homogeneous group. Differences of opinion are welcome and eagerly put to discussion: they should come as no surprise. However, a common ground does exist, and it does differentiate Sic from other currents. For example, a transhistorical and teleological understanding of class struggle, which turns its back on any periodisation of its content, will not be at home here; the conception of ever recurring proletarian assaults, identical to each other and with no actual history in between, belongs to those ready to interpret the possibly good one just like the others, with the only difference that it was successful instead of unsuccessful; the ‘proposal’ (whom to?) of models of society which would be ‘better’ than the existing one is none of our preoccupations; the faith in the demarcation and extension of a communist terrain, in a communist rodent diving into the capitalist cheese and gradually eating it away, is not ours.’
New web address: http://sicjournal.org/ (with texts also available in French)
First published in: http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/sic-international-journal-for-communisation-issue-2
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