The Antinomies of Antagonism

As a fundamental perspective we can see the principle task of the revolutionary movement is to aid in the process of the recomposition of an antagonist class subject.

However, those who focus on the aspect of antagonism to the detriment of the class aspect, are guilty of the voluntarist (& sectarian) conception of antagonism as belief or ideology.

For us antagonism is neither a belief nor form of consciousness, but an immanent characteristic of the capitalist dynamic. If we focus on the recomposition of the class subject, capitalism will provide the antagonism free of charge.

As a fundamental perspective we can see the principle task of the revolutionary movement is to aid in the process of the recomposition of an antagonist class subject.

However, those who focus on the aspect of antagonism to the detriment of the class aspect, are guilty of the voluntarist (& sectarian) conception of antagonism as belief or ideology.

For us antagonism is neither a belief nor form of consciousness, but an immanent characteristic of the capitalist dynamic. If we focus on the recomposition of the class subject, capitalism will provide the antagonism free of charge.

Hence the true danger is not the possibility of producing a non-antagonistic class subject, but to produce a merely political subject, rather than a class subject.

Thus the limitations of the specific political organisation taken in isolation – it cannot transcend the creation of a political subject. The descent into the sectarian policing of ideology or behaviours of participants as the key to assuring "proper" class content is futile and ultimately self-defeating.

So are mass organisations the way to produce a class subject? Yes and no. The specific danger of the mass organisation is to produce an institutional subject. Here in fact, the subjectivity of the collective subject decays, as the organisation itself substitutes for the collective subject in the eyes of the loyal organisation cadre or militant, but appears as external or alien to the ordinary member, appearing ultimately as yet another institution of existing society that may or may not be manipulated to provide benefits to individuals or groups. In this way collective subjectivity is decomposed for the mass membership and demands the militant defend the organisation against the interests of the members and the wider class itself. To the degree that it necessarily excludes other sections of the class, it narrows the horizons to the particular sectional interests it defends, rather than the class as a whole, thus reproducing the relations of competion and dependency, characteristic of capitalist social relations.

Hence the perspective of dual organisationalism which refers, not to the numbers of organisations in question (for example see the texts on intermediate organisation by Scott Napalos), but the insufficiency of any one organisational form for the recomposition of the class subject. This is not merely a question of mutiplicity versus monolithism, but a focus on process of dynamic balance in the interrelations and mutual feedback between the different organisational forms. By the same token it is anti-substitutional, there is no organisational form that can substitute for the class for itself. Finally it is anti-fetishistic, rejecting the fetishism of antagonism as individual acts of destructive self-actualisation that define the praxis of the so-called insurrectionist tendency.