Read Comradely Greetings for Free Online Page B

starts intensifying or diversifying affect, but only in order to extract surplus-value. It hijacks affect in order to intensify profit potential. It literally valorizes affect. The capitalist logic of surplus-value production starts to take over the relational field that is also the domain of political ecology, the ethical field of resistance to identity and predictable paths. It’s very troubling and confusing, because it seems to me that there’s been a certain kind of convergence between the dynamic of capitalist power and the dynamic of resistance.
    One can supplement this analysis in many directions. For instance, the very process of creating “liberated territories” outside the domain of State has itself been reappropriated by capitalism. Exemplary here are the so-called “Special Economic Zones”: geographical regions within a (usually) Third World state enjoying more liberal economic laws designed to attract greater foreign investment—low or zero taxes, free flow of capital, limitation or prohibition of trade unions, no minimum wage requirement, etc. The SEZ label covers a whole range of more specific zone types such as Free Trade Zones, Export Processing Zones, Free Zones,Industrial Estates, Free Ports, Urban Enterprise Zones, etc. With their unique combination of “openness” (as free spaces partially exempt from state sovereignty) and closure (discipline unencumbered by legally guaranteed freedoms), which renders possible the heightened exploitation, these Zones are the structural counterparts of the celebrated communities of “intellectual labor”; they are the fourth term in the tetrad of high-tech intellectual labor, gated communities, and slums.
    What happens then, when the system no longer excludes the excess, but directly posits it as its driving force—as is the case when capitalism can only reproduce itself through a continual self-revolutionizing, a constant overcoming of its own limits? Then one can no longer play the game of subverting the Order from the position of its part-of-no-part, since the Order has already internalized its own permanent subversion. With the full deployment of “late capitalism” it is “normal” life itself which, in a way, becomes “carnivalized,” with its constant reversals, crises, and reinventions, such that it is now the critique of capitalism, from a “stable” ethical position, which increasingly appears as the exception. Of course, the egalitarian-emancipatory “deterritorialization” is not the same as the postmodern-capitalist one, but the latter nonetheless radically changes the terms of the struggle insofar as the enemy is no longer the established hierarchic order of a State. How, then, are we to revolutionize an order whose very principle is one of a constant self-revolutionizing?
    More than a solution to the problems we are facing today, Communism is itself the name of a problem: of the difficult task of breaking out of the confines of the market-and-stateframework, a task for which no quick formula is at hand: “It’s just the simple thing that’s hard, so hard to do,” as Brecht put it in his “In Praise of Communism.”
    The key here is to maintain a proper sense of orientation, and it’s here that I totally agree with your profound insight that the fundamentalists are merely “the tip of the iceberg. There’s a powerful antifascist dictum that ‘the fascists do the killing, the authorities the burying.’ ” This is the crucial point always to bear in mind when those in power try to deflect our critical energies towards different forms of (religious, nationalist …) fundamentalism: from the Tea Party in the US to the West Bank settlers in Israel and the Orthodox nationalists in Russia, “fundamentalists” are, for all their apparent passion, ultimately puppets used and manipulated by the cold logic of state power. The task is not to crush them, but to try to redirect their passion against those who use and manipulate them.