For a guy who has remarkably little to say about communization theory and strategy, in his essay, “Fire to the Commons”, Evan Calder Williams proves that he can just drone on and on, while saying nothing.

Williams’ essay was published as part of Clever Monkey’s stubbornly silly anthology, “Communization and Its Discontents”.

It is more than three-quarters of the way through the essay when Williams reminds us that he has not even mentioned the term, communization, much less discussed it. Apparently concerned to leave this surprising streak unbroken, Williams tells us this was his intention all along:

Despite the specificity of the volume, I have not yet spoken of communization, for the simple reason that I have not yet spoken of transition. My concern has been how we understand the position in which we find ourselves and how that relates to our discontinuous instances, what might chain them together, what forms of thought could aid that work.

In other words, communization only concerns the actual transition to communism; Williams first had to explain to us where we are situated within this transition. But even this definition of communization may be too broad, Williams tells us: communization doesn’t mean we have actually begun a transition to communism simply because the limits of capital has been reached, nor does it mean we can begin the transition right now through our praxis.

Instead, communization calls into question the very notion of a revolutionary transition itself.

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Williams admits he is not the only person who doubts a revolution against capital is possible in today’s social environment. The class struggle seems unlikely to give rise to a spontaneous revolution. Communization theory may tell us only that the class struggle has reached an impasse, but it can’t tell us how to get to communism in spite of this impasse.

If the contradictions of capital generate an antagonism between forces and relations of production, the elaboration of communist thought and strategy is designed to change the course of and speed up this worsening contradiction. Theory can do no more than this. We have no control over the objective conditions of society.

Communization is not simply a path we choose to take or not take, but there is no guarantee that this path actually leads to communism either. To say we will be forced to choose communization doesn’t tell us how we will be forced to choose communization, what measures will be necessary, what kind of resistance we will encounter, nor how long the process will take.

If this is not bad enough, Williams tells us communism, the aim of the revolutionary transition, cannot even be defined beforehand:

For communism has no content, and it is not form. It is decomposition. It is the mass, committed, and uncertain undoing of the representations that mediate form and content, time and labor, value and property, and all the real relations that sustain between them. It begins not outside, before, or after, but right there, with the absent content of having nothing in common. It starts in times when a set of material limits show themselves as being unsurpassable other than by a practical appropriation of necessary goods and an accompanying rejection of social forms. Such times do and will come, though not everywhere at once. How it will go is hard to say.

If this argument sounds familiar, it should: it is the same as Justice Potter Stewart’s 1964 definition of obscenity.

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For those of you who may be unfamiliar with Justice Potter Stewart and what anything he ever said in his entire life has to do with communism, let me briefly explain. In the landmark Jacobellis v. Ohio decision, the Supreme Court basically overturned all obscenity laws in the United States and made it possible for us to watch porn on our laptops. In that decision, Justice Stewart gave his reasoning for his vote to overturn this way:

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [“hard-core pornography”], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

Like Justice Potter in the case of obscenity, Williams argues that he can’t tell us a damn thing about communism, but we’ll know it when we see it!

There is a big problem with Williams’ argument for strategy.

According to Wikipedia, the Potter Stewart doctrine as applied to communism seems to imply that communism is subjective or lacks clearly defined parameters. Communization, since it is no more than the direct and immediate realization of communism, likewise loses all definition.

Based on Williams’ argument, it may in fact be true that communization is simply recovering a lost commons, ending privatization and acts of sharing. How would we know when the entire notion of communism takes shape “not outside, before, or after, but right there” in the moment of the revolution itself.

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This argument has deep implication for strategy, because it mostly leave us passively awaiting some future event. According to Williams, if the class struggle has petered out for all intents and purposes, nevertheless the revolution marks the critical turning point in history. We cannot substitute any conscious initiative in place of the revolution, precisely because the revolution itself defines the form and content of communism.

What then follows are banal generalities about strategy: Since everything will be decided by this future event, we must remain grounded in the present and skeptical of our strategy. The future is composed mostly of unknown unknowns. We must expect the unexpected. Events will be messy. We should be adaptable. The revolution could begin anywhere and the collapse of capitalism is not simply an economic event. We should be prepared to adapt to what is thrown at us, but always look for an opening. Communism will emerge from the conflict. Our only concern is to avoid another dead end.

Really?

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With 170 years of experience under our belts is this really the best communists can do when it come to elaborating a strategy?