Zones of Proletarian Development
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[edit] Riot studies 101
Is the zoped the machine of choice for a time travelling proletariat, like the scooters that carry the teenage gangs who inflict their own 'unitary urbanism' on the cities that are built to bury them in a 2-dimensional technological skin of alientation? Mastaneh Shah-Shuja's new book Zones of Proletarian Development shows that the ZPD - a unique form of zoped, short for "zone of proximal development" - can transport us or rather transform reality and the subject in a process of proletarianisation. The ZPD is also compared to the TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone) but unlike most zombie anarchs and teenage gangs who can not escape the limits of the individual, the ZPD is rooted in class consciousness and class struggle and therefore goes beyond individual person and individual situation to a transformative morphology of the unique.
[edit] Anti-fascist
Another book recently published is Anti-fascist by Martin Lux. This book is very exhilarating, giving some good accounts of vanguardist violence against the NF, NP, BM and other far right groups in the 1970s - and also provides some insight into the inherent institutional racism of the anarchist movement. Despite claiming that 'asians' and 'blacks' were never the 'real' enemy of the NF, the author goes on to use the word "paki" many times as well as 'nigger' in capital letters, quoting racist slogans. It is interesting that the author is himself neither, referring to his father as a "Paddie". Contrasted with the anti-capitalist collective PAKI.TV's attempts to 'reclaim' the word 'paki' - in its original context of 'Panjab Afghania Kashmir' and later on as 'Psycho Active Kinetik', this is a blatant reorientation of the word in its right wing context.
It is also interesting that the author himself refers to people as 'asian' or 'black' much like the current British policy in categorising 'black' people as separate from so-called 'asian' - which is used to refer to people of the Indian sub-continent. This is runs counter to the language used by the United Black Youth League some of whom were known as the Bradford 12 when put on trial for physical anti-facist resistance to an NF march in Bradford on 11 July 1981. The use of the word 'Asian' in particular is becoming a powerful political construct at the same time as it becomes useless in providing any cohesive identity to people that make up the numerical majority of humanity, encompassing as it does both Chinese and Indian nationals. Given all this, the author only gives one black person - who is identified as a "paki" any voice at all. That person is simply portrayed as a snivelling prole and promptly told to 'fuck off' by the author. The book is full of other anti-working class justifications for vanguardist action and the only political basis of the authors actions are based mainly on the Zionism and international anarchism of his close comrades - a contradiction we are told that is never resolved for him.
Recently the contradiction between racial essentialism and international anarchism has been resolved in the Australian New Right who recently attended anti-Olympics demonstrations in Canberra in a National Anarchist Black Bloc with the banner 'We are all Tibetans now'. They are not the only ones who have supported the CIA backed Tibetan independence movement but it is no surprise that they link to London Class War and Indymedia whose lack of political coherence leaves them open to such exploitation. Of course Class War can righteously assert they are not responsible for who links to their website. Yet in this semantic war, ignorance is poor basis from which to defend a political organisation. Mastaneh, indeed, identifies Indymedia as excluding the ZPD. Returning to the comparison between the ZPD and the TAZ, a further trajectory of bourgeoisification - and even nazification can be seen in some National Anarchists' ideas of National Autonomous Zones (NAZ) - like the TAZ these come from US west-coast anarchists) which would not be areas where Proletarians would be able to survive without becoming be Nazis - National Autonomous Zone Inhabitants (NAZIs).
The use of the Black Bloc tactic by the right wing is of course inevitable has been obvious to us since 2001 and the handful of fatalities suffered at anti-capitalist demonstrations around the world including of course at the G8 Genoa Demo where one person was killed and countless others nearly fatally injured by police. At the time, the criticisms of the Black Bloc tactic were not answered by those defending its use and therefore parties showed their inherent use of secret modes of organising. This is of course in line with the anonymity that powers the Black Bloc and as has been pointed out many times before, makes it very easy to be infiltrated by those with unknown political reasons, and of course by state agents. Further still, the use of 'direct action' methods became further and further spectacularised - all this moves actions away from the ZPD, defined by Mastaneh as incorporating the carnivalesque and dialectical learning - and towards spectacular and ritual actions, which Mayday had become.
Another interesting discussion point made in ZPD is the enduring image from the 2000 Mayday of the vandalism of the Churchill statue in Parliament Square. Mastaneh is correct that this image - this action - this vandalisation is indeed an essential moment of resistance in the semantic warfare against the ruling power. However I would like to take her analysis a little further in looking at the decomposition of the zone here.
The ZPD primarily frames the action, much like the situationist 'situation' in the immediate space and time of 'here' and 'now'. However when we move away from that point we start to collapse coherence into an unlimited number of interpretations and permutations that then come more directly into the pull of power.
One feature of the mutation of the Churchill statue was that the head - and green turf Mohican addition - became a separate iconograph - a letter even - which was subsequently taken up by different agents including Banksy. This artist is also famous for doing stencils of the Queen as a monkey. His prisoner monkey stencils I would argue, display a certain racism and besides that also echo his one time teacher Jamie Reid's graphics for the Sex Pistols which was always and already a recuperation of situationist detournment. In this case the recuperation is even more complete, given that revolutionaries looking at the Churchill graff from outside of the ZPD that Mayday 2000 constituted saw the consolidation of British identity in London. As proletarians we do not want punk royalty or punk politicians - we want to consign these pompous idiots to the dustbin of history once and for all.
Another clue to the decomposition of the ZPD into a ZBD is that the original graff showed a variety of political proletarian graphitti/ hypergraphy from Anarchy and Hammer Sickle signs to Hip-Hop tagging and Communist party logos - most prominently the TIK-B - Turkiye Ihtilalci Komünistler Birligi (Revolutionary Communist Union of Turkey). This shows the diversity of revolutionaries who attacked the monument/ statue of Churchill and of course reminds us that Churchill advocated the use of poison gas against Kurdish civilians in 1920 as well as pretty much anywhere in the British empire: "I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes." he had said. The subsequent deterioration of the ZPD has been marked, as observed in the book by strengthening of the 'official' TUC march. I would argue that again the split in the proletariat was also to do with the inherent institutional racism of the left - and of the Anarchist movement which has always been dominated and controlled by Eurocentric views and organisations, especially secret Bakuninist organisations. One Anarchist remarked to me a few years back that he was disappointed that Mayday marches were dominated by 'Turkish Communists' and this comes as no surprise as European identity consolidates itself in European chauvinists at the precise moment that it is being threatened by the growth of a worldwide proletarian movement. Or rather it does so in order to subsume and dominate the worldwide proletarian movement by relying on and reinforcing the materially powerful and dominant European identity over worldwide proletarian identity which is always fluid and becoming and therefore easy to oppress in the here and now. This is also borne out in how Martin Lux's activities in Antifascist also seem to be forever tail ending the vanguardist violence of "Maoist nutters" whose politics and militancy is more organised than his own Anarcho-Zionist comrades.
If we look at Anti-fascist in comparison with with Pat Mills 'Invasion' comic strip which ran in 2000AD in 1977-78. This story revolves around a working class anti-authoritarian, Bill Savage, who becomes a leader of British resistance to a "Volgan" invasion occurring on 12th January 1999. As Mills points out in his introduction to the 2007 reprint, Volgans was a euphemism for Russians. As Savage wages his struggle against the invaders, various working class stereotypes are mobilised to join the struggle, stereotypes who are shown as being more effective than the upper classes, like the two army officers who attempt to infiltrate a Volgan base, but give themselves away with their zombie like obedience, when a suspicious Volgan barks "Attentiom!"( Prog 15). 'Fingers' Frampton is a pick pocket who gives his life to liberate enslaved Brits. Savage himself is a long distance lorry driver who has an extensive network of proletarians across Great Britain. Miners, oilmen, bikers woodsmen, the Scots inhabitants of the Gorbals are all mobilised. The Miners leader even has a fist fight with Savage.
[edit] All Power to the Imagination!
Returning to ZPD, I should also mention the use of detourned graphics in the book which are fucking mind blowing, but I want to look at another innovative use of graphics in the book which is the use and hypergraphical extension of zoped diagrams to represent the power flows in the ZPD. This diagram is initially radical in that it is not just a 'mind-map' or ideograph showing a mapping of semantic space like RDF semantic ontology maps do. It is more like an Isotope or hypergraphic in that its axes include space and time as well as semantics. The distance between 'Subject' and 'Object' as well as 'Outcome' in particular, show temporal duration as well as spatial and semantic ones.
In showing proletarian relations we should be aware that it is the proletariat that creates all tools and even DoL and rules - although the creation is mediated and rerouted in space by the bourgeoisie. So we can maybe visualise a matrix of interrelations
Or if we increase the spatial and temporal content of the axes...
The triangle formation of the zoped diagram in particular reminds me of course of the 'eye in the triangle' of the ruling classes and also of the hierarchical diagram made famous by Industrial Worker.
I would like to suggest here a relationship between the zoped diagram and this one, in that the ZPD can become a ZBD when the subject (as proletariat) points towards the object as bourgeois - into the hierarchy.
Comparing the 2 diagrams we can overlay them and compare the subject as proletariat - or aristocracy, while the object is the ruling class- the bourgeoisie. The power of the bourgeoisie is quite categorically illustrated as occupying the centre of the structure and therefore able to influence and control both aristocracy and proletariat. The diagram is still oriented as with the aristocracy at the top but we could easily invert this diagrammatically.
And for the ZPD to flourish we would have to reorientate the hierarchy - as a lowerarchy - but developing out of the confines of the situations of bourgeoisification:
Here the Proletariat are at the top of the diagram and the situation of proletarianisation, instead of being absorbed into the area of the bourgeoisie, moves out of the hierarchy - creates a rupture and leads into a space beyond and outside it. There are of course many more permutations that this sort of hypergraphy can take but ZPD shows us what is possible when we break out of the pre-conceived notions of history, theory and praxis and begin to make connections across disparate proletarian struggles throughout time, space and meaning.
Another book I have been reading - well re-reading recently is Dave Douglass's "All power to the Imagination" from 1999. The above diagrams could well apply to the role of the Unions in the Miners Strikes. Dave takes on what he calls petit-bourgeois anarchists and arm chair revolutionaries who consider the unions only as a monolithic organisation with bourgeois leadership - Dave as a miner and a NUM organiser as well as member of Class War, sees it as an activity - orchestrated by the proletariat and oriented to creating rupture with hierarchy and leading to a new space beyond exploited relations of production.
The first diagram could also be used to illustrate the bourgeois mode of organising that charectorises the petir-bourgeois anarcho groups like those involved in the Climate Camp that as Dave has pointed out this month have attacked miners livelihoods by protesting for the closure of Drax powerstation in Yorkshire. Rather that attack the far more powerful and damaging petrol industry - which is very ready for tactical attack at this time, they concentrate on the weak miners. It is, of course, to be expected that they invite comment from the NUM and from mine workers in general - after they have made their decisions for action against them. The Climate Camp is partly porganised by Network for Climate Action and other groups based at the so-called London Action Resource Centre, part of the PGA network, whose Anarcho-racism has earned them the nickname of the London Anarcho-Racist Centre.
We should comment, in ending, that the anti-working class and racist modes of organising that are typical of the Zone of Bourgeois Retardation are quite typical of the left wing of capital and should be properly be seen not as the cause but the result of the decline in working-class and proletarian struggle and the renewed offensive of the ruling bourgeois class over the last 20 years all over the world which can only be countered by referring back to the worldwide working-class which in struggle is the only real possibility of development for humanity.
Forthcoming: "Geordies — Wa Mental" - the first volume in the autobiographical trilogy (Stardust and Coaldust) of David John Douglass - released on 29th September 2008.
[edit] References
- Zones of Proletarian Development by Mastaneh Shah-Shuja, OpenMute, London, 2008 ISBN 9781906496067
- Anti-fascist by Martin Lux, Phoenix Press, London, 2006 ISBN 093835X
- All Power to the Imagination! by David Douglass, The Class War Federation, (PO Box 467, London E8 3QX), 1999. ISBN 0953734706
- Geordies — Wa Mental by David John Douglass, ChristieBooks, 2008 ISBN 1873976348
