De Te Fabula Narratur: Radical phenomena in the class struggle of our time. Interview with Barbaria
Interview with Barbaria by De Te Fabula Narratur
Original version in magyar
Introduction
1
To maintain, to develop the live, vivid proletarian movement, to destroy the past, the present, the obsolote… to shatter the antihistoricism of the postmodern (The galaxy of capital itself! The Untermensch! ), which is a very effective weapon of the counter-revolutionary capitalist ideology and praxis. ’For only an historical being can have an experience of history and can talk about it.’ (Castoriadis) Our melancholy days stagger in moments of forgetfulness and oblivion, this lewd abode is the realm of the whores of capital, where their beautiful dream is realized. This dream promises nothing but the existence-vegetation what it’s own empire shits out. Labor is an executive machine. The nymphs are poster images. History is archaeology. A bone monument.
The class struggle is a Walt Disney animation on the screen of dead cinema.
But the bourgeoisie is afraid of us… (although it knows that we are wrestling in the mud in the lethargic knowledge of our own defeat, in the hell of our own despoilment.) The attitude dictated by fear has become the strongest bulwark of the exploiters, the bourgeois, the rich, against the social revolution that threatens to eliminate them. They are doing everything they can to make the revolution impossible. They experiment on us, like lab rats, because they want to see to what extent our resignation and degradation will make us support their system and do their bidding. History has come to crossroads, here is the chance of a breakout point, here is the celebration of death over the old order: the bourgeois are tired of their yachts, their planes, their „trophy” fetishism, they are tired of their own boredom. The body grew sad and lonely. . The dispossessed have only one chance for life. Together they must escape their financial struggles, because they have no other hope than to arrive to the open air of free pleasures! And they must know that it is only their will to live that gives birth to class organisation, solidarity, festive meetings and the unfolding of radical theoretical seeds, all of which implies the destruction of the profit-producing society. They know, because they have to know (their history screams it to their face), that the rediscovery of class solidarity will dismantle the cages set by the predator. This publication is nothing more (especially not a mystification, manipulation, diversion, a series of dead messages for the future) than a presentation of a radical current in Spain and our dialogue with them, which we hope to continue in the future in its own critical process of clarification.
2
When Barbaria, infused with communist lyricism manifests, ’Where did we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?’ -in their own Gauguinian essentialist self-definition: ’Each time throughout history that the exploited classes have risen up, they have carried along the same barbarism, the same human community against the exploitation. Barbaria is a place that resides in memory.’ In their essence, they speak of the visible and invisible thread of history, of the unquenchable, indestructible liveliness and presence of the communist struggle, which parallels what J. Camette describes as: ’Revolution does not emerge from one or another part of our being – from body, space or time. Our revolution as a project to reestablish community was necessary from the moment when ancient communities were destroyed. ’
We would like to highlight the incredibly important radicalism in the revolutionary attitude of Barbaria’s irreconcilability with reality. The spice of life!
This is the baseline for today, for yesterday, for tomorrow. Operating not on principle but on tactics is not Machiavellianism, self-surrender, role-playing,
submission, concession, gesture, abuse of revolutionary dialectics! (’The role, as a form of alienated activity, like a vampire, nourishes on real life; the goal, by contrast, is not a detour but the revolutionary realization of communism as a total world of free creativity.’) Nothing else brings us closer to communism, only the adherence to the practice of a solid communist program. There is nothing to improve, nothing to humanize in the morgue of capital. This would prolong the agony of a system that kills, destroys, murders, domesticates us, our class, on a daily basis. It is for this reason, and for no other, that a radical understanding of capitalist society is central to the communist militancy of non-conciliation with reality.
In principle, we agree with what Barbaria says here about compromise and oppurtunism.
The exception, however (and this is not an aside, but an act of image destruction), is their attitude towards Bolshevism, which will be discussed in the next section.
3
Until the above-mentioned continuation that we are hoping for occurs, we also have to mention about one or two negative aspects. All this concerns mainly the identity of the Barbarian group, i.e. their left-wing communism, which makes no sense in our opinion, as communism has no left-wing (it cannot have one, because the COMMUNIST MOVEMENT is not left-wing, even if this very misleading term is used and very damagingly so spread in communist circles too). What really exists is the left of Bolshevism (Bordiga Bordigism, Damen, Munis etc. etc…) who retain the Bolshevik Party as the organising centre of the proletarian revolution and reject the organic development of Stalinism from it. They draw a sharp line between the foundations of Bolshevism and Stalinism, attributing to Stalinism the counter- revolution most of all, and in this sense ’original Bolshevism’ remains an identity to be critically treated – but retaining, not transcending, its foundations, while they are against the Stalinism that emerged from the Bolshevism.
Left Bolshevism, on the other hand, has overthrown the communist movement itself, and has fertilised it in a radically progressive sense. That is why they must not be thrown off of the communist boat. That is why we once wrote the following, applying it to Bordiga himself and to the actual radicals of the movement.:
Albeit we reject Bordiga’s Leninism and his absurd, baseless accusations made against the consistently anti-Bolshevik communist tendencies, there is no doubt that the spirit of his activity and his writings (which helped in maintaining the continuity of the communist critique concerning the capitalist mode of production at many points) is the „passion of communism”. In this sense, he actually goes together with Marx and the other communist revolutionaries. (http://barricade.epizy.com/rolunk/rolunk-en.html)
We have written and translated so much about the radical difference between communism and Bolshevism and about Stalinism, the offspring of Bolshevism, that the letters have already worn off our keyboards.[1]
The Barbaria group can be put in the same category as those who consider Stalinism, counter-revolutionary (though not uncritically, and rather illusionarily, they also indicate their criticism of Lenin’s Bolshevism, but do not break away from it completely).
’Distinguish revolution from counter-revolution.’ manifests the Barbaria – so do it radically!
4
Reflecting on point 5 – as an insertion – I would end it with a quote from Marx:
„The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with there capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”
„Both Trotsky and Stalin base their versions of the Marxist ideology on the authority of Lenin. Indeed, even the most orthodox of the orthodox Marxists who had fought a bitter struggle both against the Narodnikism of Nikolai-on and against the Parvus-Trotskyist theory of the «permanent revolution» before October, 1917, and who, in the same way, had most consistently opposed after October the then prevailing tendency to glorify the meager achievements of the later so-called war- communism of 1918-20, concluded that life-long fight for critico-revolutionary realism by upholding at a decisive moment the neo-populist concept of a home- made Russian socialism against the actually prevailing conditions. Within a few weeks those who had opposed the socialistic idealization of the first years and who at the first announcement of the NEP of 1921 had still quite soberly declared this «new economic policy of a worker’s and peasant’s state» to be a necessary step backward from the further-going attempts of war-communism, discovered the socialistic nature of state capitalism and a cooperatively tinged yet essentially bourgeois economy, Thus, it was not the Leninist epigone Stalin but the orthodox Marxist Lenin who, at that historical turning-point of the revolutionary development when the hitherto undecided practical tendencies of the Russian Revolution were «seriously and for a long time» directed to the restoration of a non-socialistic economy, at the same time added what he then deemed to be an indispensable ideological supplement to that final restriction of its practical aims. It was the orthodox Marxist Lenin who in opposition to all his earlier declarations first set up the new Marxist myth of the inherently socialist character of the Soviet state and of the thereby basically guaranteed possibility of a complete realization of socialist society in an isolated Soviet Russia.” (http://gondolkodo.mypressonline.com/elemek/fabula/archivum_komm_holnap.ht ml)
With communist greetings:
De Te Fabula Narratur
Communist Publiser
Budapest-Vienna 2022
The Gondolkodó Autonom bookshop distributes the group’s publications
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When the weavers of Lyon rose up in arms in 1831, the bourgeoisie remembered class. It remembered the invasions of those primitive peoples who assaulted the roman Empire, who they called barbarians, because their language sounded like noise. The weavers didn’t speak a language that the bourgeoisie could understand either. In the millenarian struggle between civilization and barbarism, the revolution is expressed in a language that is not the language of the masters, a language which the Empire of civilization cannot grasp. Each time throughout history that the exploited classes have risen up, they have carried along the same barbarism, the same human community against the exploitation. Barbaria is a place that resides in memory. It is there where the millenarian history of our class is kept, from the primitive communities to the worldwide human community. Barbaria is a place which unfolds in the struggle, it’s all that is incomprehensible, irrecuperable for capital. Barbaria is there, where the language of the masters doesn’t reach.
1. What is the antecedent of the group, what kind of heritage of the movement do you come from?
We radicalised during the indignados movement and we took part in the differents struggles that rose after 2011 until the appearance of Podemos. Our critique to Podemos will lead us to form Grupo germinal that will be the direct precedent of Barbaria which some of us where part of it. Germinal had influences from Dauve and communisation and the main thing we did as a group was to publish a magazine1. Germinal dissolved in 2017as a result of a discussion within the group about how is the better way to build a proletarian estructure and our role in the class struggle. From Germinal Barbaria was born and the importance of the organization and the revolutionary positions became one of its foundations. As Barbaria, we position ourselves within the current of the communist left, with great influence from the Italian left. We could say that from the Germinal experience there is a search for radicalism and clarification of revolutionary positions. Something that for us, as Barbaria, is essential and to which we dedicate an important part of our activity, both within the group with discussions about programmatic questions or revolutionary experiences of our class, as well as outside through meetings and publications.
2. Why is it important for you to maintain the traditions of the movement?
By the traditions of the movement we understand the lessons that the revolutionary minorities have drawn from the revolutionary experiences of the proletariat. Due to the stalinist counterrevolution, which we cannot yet consider overcome, we are in the position of re-establishing rather than maintaining revolutionary positions.
As the Bilan comrades said during the 1930s „not to betray”, which for us is of great importance because it means to maintain uncompromising revolutionary positions that allow us not to fall into opportunism and to be ready for when there is a class movement to participate in.
3. What do you see as the problem of the separation of movement and class in?
As mentioned in the previous question, we give crucial importance to the Stalinist counterrevolution and all its offshoots. It is because of the counter-revolution that there is a radical cut in the revolutionary programme and theory from the late 1920’s onwards with the exception of the Spanish proletariat during the 1930’s. The counter-revolution implies a generalised inversion of terms: communism means soviet capitalism, Chinese soviet imperialist interests will be called internationalism, etcetera. What we mean by this is that, for us, the main separation between the class and the movement is that of the class with its historical programme and its own revolutionary experience. The counter-revolution was not only political but also theoretical.
Moreover, as Marx had developed in his critique of political economy, capitalism, unlike earlier modes of production, is a social relation that tends to reproduce itself automatically. Naturalising its system of exploitation as if it were inherent to things, what Marx called commodity fetishism. A fetishism that is proper to the whole of its social forms: we can thus speak of a fetishism of capital, of democracy, of technology. The fetishism of the commodity does not, however, eliminate the social antagonism between classes. An antagonism that will tend to express itself more and more in the coming period because capitalism is reaching its internal limits. Put in a simplified way, capitalist competition forces the replacement of human labour by dead labour, constant capital. However, only from living labour can capital derive surplus value, so the very movement of capital is crumbling under its feet
4. What causes the internal divisions within the movement? How can this be overcome?
Without repeating ourselves too much, we believe that clarity about the counter- revolution is central. In this sense we see two fundamental tasks: the first is the programmatic and theoretical work to restore the historical thread of our class and the second is internationalist collaboration and that the work of theoretical clarification be as collective and international as possible.
5. What problems do you see with the lack of class consciousness that the transformation of the world of wage labour (especially in the centre) has created?
As we said in question 3, we believe that the social situation is changing. Due to the erosion of the Stalinist counter-revolution that started in the 60s and 70s. The transformation of the world of wage labour, the expulsion of the concentration of living labour from the big factories actually draws the exhaustion of the world of capitalism. The expulsion of living labour through technological automation means that capitalism appropriates less and less surplus value, the accumulation of real capital tends to be blocked. The history of capitalism has always been catastrophic but it will be increasingly so in the coming period. Its crisis is structural, agonising, it is reaching its internal limits. As Marx said in Grundrisse, exchange value, capitalism’s own measure of wealth, is becoming a miserable substance. Only communism, a society of directly social production and distribution of human wealth can today authentically reflect the general intellect, the general intellect of associated human labor.
Moreover, the exhaustion of the world of capital (which is reflected not only in its internal limits but also in climate change or the acceleration of imperialist war) is reflected in a growth of class struggle and a cycle of revolts and rebellions that began in 2005-2006 (French Banlieus, Oaxaca), 2008 with the hunger riots in half the world, 2011 from Egypt to Spain or the United States, up to the movements of today (preceded by Chile, Hong Kong or the Yellow Vests). Obviously these are movements with a lot of democratic and citizens’ limits in many cases. But we observe a tendency towards a subterranean maturation of consciousness at the international level, as well as a process of social polarisation that necessarily borns from a world that is exhausted, that has run out of steam.
6. The clock of a taxi-cab of capital is ticking and it would be very much necessary for the mass that actually produces this kind of separation, by not functioning as a class, to organise itself into a class. What do you see as the solution to this?
In relation to the last thing we have said, it seems to us that the possibility of these struggles converging with the historical programme of the proletariat is very important: communism as the overcoming of value, commodity, money, the state. Obviously in the short term this is impossible. We think of the process of the constitution of the proletariat as a class, as a party, as a process. It is not something photographic, which we can lock up in the immediate. In the short term, what seems essential to us is that from all these struggles minorities can gradually emerge and connect with this historic programme. For this, communication, coordination, discussion of all these minorities (not only those that arise in the immediate struggle but also those that come from other past experiences of our class) is also central.
7. How can man wield influence on the social environment?
We believe that as revolutionary minorities in a time of relative social peace we cannot have any special influence on the proletariat. However, this develops in two respects. On the one hand, it is vital to understand the proletariat as a world class and to make its struggle everywhere in the world our own. This means that for us the struggle of the proletariat in Kazakhstan or Sri Lanka is just as important as one that might take place in Spain. Internationalism is central and the importance of revolutionary minorities being connected is crucial. We can never lose the world perspective of revolution. On the other hand, we are seeing how the very contradictions of capitalism and the crisis, which is worsening day by day, are producing greater social polarisation that is intensifying by the minute. It is not through our individual will that we can have influence or an intelligent tactic that allows us to find the right way to mobilise the proletariat. This does not mean that we believe we cannot have real influence. In fact, our role will be very important in the movements that come as a consequence of the crisis of capital. But those movements arise spontaneously as a consequence of the contradictions of capitalism and not because of great men. Our role in those movements will be to act from within by defending revolutionary positions and orienting them towards them.
8. What is the scope of your group’s activities, what is the focus?
Our activity is both inward and outward looking. As far as organisation is concerned, we hold two types of meetings: some are topical meetings where each comrade can introduce a subject that interests or concerns them; and others, which we call programme meetings, in which we hold a discussion on the basis of a theoretical subject that a comrade has previously prepared.
On the other hand, we hold public talks, mostly in Madrid, but also in Barcelona and Alicante where there are some comrades, to make our positions known and which give us the possibility to discuss and meet new comrades. As well as the publication of theoretical articles or pamphlets that we distribute at demonstrations.
9. How do you think we can forward the international cooperation on a global scale?
We believe that what we are doing now is a good way to deepen the relations between the minorities. Through the exchange of information and analysis of the situation as well as the discussion and theoretical clarification between revolutionary minorities. We also give great importance to the translation of our texts which facilitates discussions with international groups.
10. What are your plans for the future?
As we have said, it seems to us very important to deepen as a group the clarification of revolutionary positions, to participate in and promote theoretically and practically the struggles that may arise in our places of intervention and to be part of the process of international organisation of the proletarian minorities that our class requires.
DE TE FABULA NARRATUR KOMMUNISTA KIADÓ BUDAPEST-BÉCS
2022 Terjeszti Gondolkodó Autonóm Antikvárium Bp –h 1012 Logodi utca 51
gondolkodo.mypressonline.com / DE TE FABULA NARRATUR
e-mail: gondolkodo@citromail.hu
https://detefabulanarratursite.wordpress.com/
facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/De-Te-Fabula
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[1] We have published and written a lot of translations, texts and analyses on this subject, you can visit the website of the Barricade collective (http://barricade.epizy.com/) for texts from Pannekoek, Gorter, Jean Barrot etc. and the prologues for this texts, and we also quote here the text of K. Korsch: