bernes, obrien, petrossian, inquiry on the future of revolution — ideas
even though a few of these endnotes writers do contextualize a lot of their beliefs globally or universalistically, i think it can be inferred that on average they're more likely to be referring to the "primary west" even if they argue otherwise.
more specifically, when they mention a reorganization and redistribution of technical equipment that restratifies the current global order, the weight of which is to emerge from the primary west as the footsoldier of a new requirement for revolutionary tendencies, one that entirely does away with proliterianism as a fact, is one that measures not just its own condition as globally hubristic in the sense of overfulfilled and split apart, but its oversaturating function as consistently rupturing identity-based categorical tendencies.
this is in the sense of the possibility of its existence as something that fuels a division of labour through value at all, or through naming conventions that become spirited, such as the naming of a revolutionarily conscious social class, and the many levels of abstraction that dont just make hosting that class within yourself impossible, but where the primary west even turns it into a weapon against others.
if revolution can only happen through the self-abolition of proletariat as the communalizationist standpoint claims, in their specific rendition, revolution can be seen as not only emerging from the view that capital subsumes labour relations themselves rather than reifying workers away from concrete labour relations, but that the primary west compounds these effects into a constant turnover of abstractions in a sort of closed loop, where, whenever a category comes close to externalizing its contradictions, it gets swiftly reified into a different one. or, whenever a category is named, it can be slotted into a technical virtuality that itself is standing on a tall mountain of previous orders and symbolic connotations, something difficult to deterritorialize.
for example, when the revolutionary preacher is approached by modernity and its unconscious meta-cynic defense mechanism, this same preacher then regardless of his position, if he entertains the argument already forgives his position, and if he doesnt, is then led to the commune, which on average already entertains a type of political simulation rather than struggle with definable results, because the world-interior of capital is so heavily meta-stratified that a lot of perspectives build inwards into themselves.
this is why categorically the struggling or exploited subject in the primary west has to behave differently, and in a sense, even more self-abolishingly, if we take their view, or, the inspiration to take part in their view as contextually relegated to their unique environmental context.
if you hold the idea that contemporary marxist belief about capital collapses temporality and culture as a form of regression and cope, then the communizationist standpoint is theoretically meaningful if it indicates that a practical call for revolution cant sustain the necessities of the world, and that we outgrew the social possibility of revolution not practically but logically or ontologically in specific circumstances. but, this writing made me realize i think that the very call for revolution itself also isnt stuck in a pre-contemporary form of temporality. postmodernity may not have collapsed temporality it may have imprinted it, and then the call for a "type" of revolution even over temporality itself actually continues.
the french poststructuralist canon took it as a direction to collapse revolution away from categorical deliniation especially around revolution altogether by attempting every greater conceptual depth, but revolution on its own doesnt have to be conceptually tied to its own categorical history for it as an intensity to be resumed in part by agents who not only reterritorialize its meaning but are actively arguing for a vision of temporality that views impossibility as the limit of the current state itself, so that its not true that another state of things may be possible or achievable, but that the current state of things itself extends into temporality, so that temporality harbors the total current of force within it.
this isnt about being able to do something in the new sense, to mean the ability to organize or practice any set of acts in isolation, but in the stronger sense, when bernes mentions that we can only visualize or make sense of collapse today as a type of total vision of possibility, this itself may not be a trick from reality but a trick from modernity, that reality itself cant exactly be investigated, nor does it fall so easily to the current social imagination.
rather, that our total vision of the world indicates not only that we have regressed and fallen inferior to the social order as our current standing says, and not only as o'brien would argue that it is impossible to even reorganize the state of things from any intentionalist or exclusive standpoint anymore, but also even that temporality itself isnt kidnapped and never has been, but that its dilution makes collapse seem imminanet only in the isolation of our own continously failing perspective, which itself in fact can only indicate a form of higher-order optimism, not for us but for radical insurrection and revolutionary transformation as a possible category of social order.
the difference is subtle, but if you view the end of history as the end of temporality, then there is no way for that type of history to continue indefinitely. temporality must continue if history has ended (since if cultural hauntology is the only remaining fragment yet we still move forward with it, then our social time persists, since we re-print our own social time onto cosmological time as a type of fact, even if it is suspended in nostalgia or deja vu or infinite regress), and history must continue if temporality has collapsed (because even if history qualitatively falls, in its quantitative sense, even social time ending doesnt correspond to social movement ending, hence history continues in its most secular sense).
both concepts can hold the entirety of the idea of unilateral virtuality within them. in this sense also nothing has been lost in so far as the call for a change of circumstances emerges from. to say it one more time then, temporality must continue if history has ended, and history must continue if temporality has collapsed.
but it gets even more interesting cause i also realized, its quite possible the contemporary condition manufactured the idea that somebody coming up with a good idea is what moves social relations in the first place. for a brief period this may have been a reality somewhere for us, but postmodernity actually couldnt even sustain this fantasy, and we've hardly ever seen it not be able to sustain something that actually ended up being valuable for us, which in fact may be good news for marxism for the first time in a while
when o'brien says that a revolution wont arise out of a good idea, the first international also wasnt originated by good ideas but by a lifestyle of thought that supported an entire social bubble that acted on the world. now we dont have that anymore as much or its not as useful, but it was precisely contemporary technological society that implanted on us the view that revolving ideas and a small group of belligerents deciding things could supposedly push social progress forward in the first place. once the new medium that temporarily created this impression got co-opted, such as for example a majority of google's services and their understanding of platform, this idea got pushed back into the theme of collapse.