Rosano / Journal

[Social recognition of your labour is no longer possible when you are creating commodities to be sold on the market: it is money, not labour, that tells you whether what you are doing is socially useful.]

If the separation of done from the doing is fragmenting, does would the reconnection be harmonizing?

[Marx describes the dehumanizing aspect of capitalism: it inverses relationships to the point where workers become the instruments of money, capital and machines; social relations are between things (money and the state, your money and mine) whereas human 'individuals' are merely there to exchange commodities.]

[Because we actively participate in the reproduction of capitalism, it is assumed that the state of affairs is permanent, unchangeable, and perhaps always was that way.]

[The separation of doing and done implies a capital class and labour class.]

[Doing is movement; in doing I go beyond myself; in doing, it is impossible to say that 'the world is' or that 'I am'; in doing there is no identity.]

[When doing is broken, the contradictions possible in movement are subordinated by definitive perspectives: 'the world is this way', 'that's the way things are'.]

[When doing is broken, doing is reduced to labour, to 'doing-in-the-service-of-capital-expansion'. Labour becomes quantitative: measured by hours, producing something to be sold for a price, producing value, rewarded by a wage. Doing becomes a train that moves ever faster but along pre-established tracks. Time becomes space, clock time, tick-tick time, where one tick is the same as another, time that moves but stays still, treadmill time.]

[There is no distinction between the doing of the user and of the maker.]

[Community becomes an aggregation of distinct individuals as opposed to the flow of doing. The bourgeois notion of science assumes capitalism to be permanent and considers it a virtue to distance the individual from community; he further away he is from the society he studies, the better; ideally the observer would be on the moon so as to remain maximally objective. This attempt at scientific objectivity is based upon the false idea that the thinker can be excluded while expressing his thought.]

[We write in the third-person to be scientific – first-person discourse such as 'I am bored of political parties' or 'we want a better life' is seen as unscientific.]

[Study is of or about something to distance the object from those who study it, which is another form of power-over: the best are the ones who can look at things from the outside, as a passive viewer as opposed to an active participant; the theory seperated from the theorist and can be 'applied' to the world.]

[Definition aims to not contradict; x cannot be non-x; the world becomes cleanly divided; if I am x, I cannot be y; the y becomes the Other. The not-Us (Jews, Blacks, Irish) is used to abstract horrible acts enacted upon others.]

[Identity fractures the doing and ultimately reinforces capital.]

[Sometimes asserting an identity can have an anti-identitarian meaning based on the context: to say 'I am Black' in a context of racial discrimination versus in a context of racism towards non-Blacks; to say 'I am Jewish' in Nazi Germany versus in Israel.]

[Reason has transformed from the pursuit of the good and true to that of the formally correct. It has more to do with formal mathematical logic than to do with understanding. Preferences between liberty and obedience, democracy and fascism, enlightenment or authority are seen as subjective. Reason becomes the means to an end rather than a critique of the end.]

[Identity is the antithesis of mutual recognition. By defining myself as x, independant of anyone else's recognition, my relations to others are not fundamental to my being.]

[The doer seperates from doing is also separated from the social tapestry and is a 'free' individual: free from responsibility to the community and free from meaningful participation in collective doing. The subject of bourgeois theory is an innocent, healthy, self-determining individual - any psychological problems are personal and not a result of a broken system. The more separated we are, the more identity is beyond question, the more unfree we are, the more liberated we appear to be.]

[Identification, definition, classification is not just mental but also a physical process. Jews were subjected to this in concentration camps. The bureaucratic power of the state functions similarly.]

[Power cannot be taken because it is not possessed by any person or institution: it lies in the fragmentation of social relations.]

[The state is exactly what the word suggests: a bulwark against change, against the flow of doing, the embodiment of identity.]

Part of: John Holloway: Change the world without taking power.
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