These are scattered notes serving as a place holder, not hypotheses or completed thoughts.
Consciousness- This problem is generally framed in relation to marxist conceptions of the internal conflict and contradictions of capitalism itself. People position themselves along how much work they believe that internal contradiction to do, ranging from determinism to Kautskyist voluntarism (with faith in marxist scientism replacing faith in contradiction). Yet what if in fact the objective conflicts within capitalism are not enough to produce movement that abolishes class, power, and oppression? In other words, the capital-wage labor relation are not actually productive of or sufficiently corollary to the drive towards the transformation of society in anarchist communism? Certainly history indicates limitations to proletarian struggles, and some thinkers like Camatte and other ultralefts believe that the workers movement was effectively defeated in previous periods followed by class recompositions that altered the position of the proletariat within struggles. If we see anarchist communism as more than simply base economic demands, but the creation of a new order, new people, and new desires, then it should be asked whether merely innate or produced conflicts generate such?
Crisis- One thing that crisis in our times seems to create is not neat class conflict, but cross-class conflicts. It seems as though crisis is less directed along the lines of work relationships, than around spreading delegitimization of existing structures and systems. Power is crucial there to understand such, and indeed in society in general it seems as though factory work relations have become displaced by more general relationships of domination. Part of late capitalism appears to be the undermining of previous structuring of class neighborhoods and workplaces, and the replacement with flexible class organizations within broad spaces, caste-like relations, and false freedoms integrated into a system that challenges precarity, flexibility, and class mobility, into a system that flourishes outside the workplace as well as within. How do we make sense of events like Argentina 2001, Occupy, Greece, etc., where crisis and rupture increasingly seem to occur not simply around wage labor and value production, but directed by sections of the populace against systemic reproduction itself?
Levels- the intermediate level analysis seems systematically distoring because of it’s apparent effect of encouraging timeless analysis, and building block approaches. Rather than solidifying schematic views of organization, we need concepts that allow us to see the role of history, collective mood, and power in generating, excluding, and transforming fronts of rupture and resistance. Perhaps all the language of mass, intermediate, and political levels needs to be abandoned.
Things I’m reading in thinking about this stuff
Paul Mattick Spontaneity and Organization
Gilles Dauve The Renegade Kautsky and his Disciple Lenin
Rosa Luxembourg <a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1906/mass-strike”>The Mass Strike
Jacques Camatte On Organization
SN Nappalos 