“In the spring of 1847, after much sustained coaxing, Marx and Engels agreed to join the League of the Just under one condition: that the League exclude conspiratorial thinking from its program.”
“The Communist Manifesto was written in a period known as the Vormärz, between the French revolutions of 1830 and the 1848 revolutions in Germany and France.”
“The program of this manifesto was to take what had appeared as ghostly and to construct it as Geist (spirit). In this sense, we can say that The Communist Manifesto was the determinate negation of conspiracism, which is to say that it attempted to overcome the impulsive nature of workers’ conspiracies by embedding them within a long-term perspective that would emphasize their opposite—a plan that took the laws of history into account.”
“The intended effect was to forge a new logic to give shape to disputes between individuals, casting them anew as disputes between classes, thereby maximizing participation in the conflict.”
“To that end, class and class interest became logical and practical categories for steering proletarian antagonism for the benefit of the class as a whole rather than small sects of rebels.”
“Marx’s views, we can safely say, oscillated between a Hegelian program of gifting the proletariat its own logic and an endorsement of revolutionary deeds that did not necessarily “keep themselves within the limits of the logically presumable.””
“In what is undoubtedly intended as a similar gesture for our post-enlightenment age, an anonymously authored book bearing the enigmatic title Conspiracist Manifesto was recently translated from French by the estimable Robert Hurley and published as a part of Semiotext(e)’s Intervention Series.”
“Conspiracist Manifesto shifts genres between critique, poetry, detourned quotes, historical narrative, and strategic analysis, all paired with a selection of images and memes.”
“With its persistently carnivalesque tenor, the book deflates rather than inflates the concept of conspiracy.”
“it implies that behind the conspiracy theories scattered throughout its pages—many of which point to rather banal power games with no deeper significance—there is just emptiness; no plan, no omnipotent world leader.”
“those determined to put their passion for justice into action might be surprised at how fragile the status quo really is.”
“such action is most likely to succeed if accompanied by a plan—a conspiracy—to steer the anarchic flows of the world towards something we could call communism.”
“The question is whether the book is a sign of a more general turn towards the need for conspiracies in the form of concrete plans for how we can construct a desirable future.”
“By reducing conspiracies to a struggle for mundane economic and political interests, this anonymous manifesto shows the need to plan how we can move away from the bleak world it depicts.”
“Against the conspiracies of the market and war, it urges us to plan a liveable and desirable future.”
“What Conspiracist Manifesto calls for is not the activity of small, closed, Blanquist sects attempting to carry out coups in favor of partial interests, but rather an open conspiracy that involves transmitting an analysis with a broad appeal, inviting participation from a heterogenous and nonspecialized crowd.”
“The book’s French title is not “Manifeste Complotiste,” which would be the conventional equivalent to “Conspiracist Manifesto,” but rather “Manifeste Conspirationiste.” The use here of the adjective form of “conspiration” (literally “breath together”) evokes the pneuma—the unitary substance that, for the Stoics, fills the world, connecting everything.”
“Conspiring is about mixing impure elements together; that’s why Marx called his conspiratorial rivals “alchemists of the revolution.””
“The lesson here is that anyone taking a position within these movements must be careful not to side against delusional beliefs, or even madness; the point is to find a way to let it breathe, for madness can be a miraculous weapon. Poverty causes a soul-destroying form of madness. Trying to pass a smog test in California is madness. Madness can be an intoxicating form of class hatred that drives proletarians to risk everything even when they have little chance of winning against their adversaries. This is why communists must have tools for working with it.”
“Freud called delusions an attempt at a cure; they initiate the process of making sense of experiences that cannot be processed otherwise.”
“revolution is not merely a question of adjusting the economy; it involves the transformation of the human species itself: for them, revolution is first and foremost an anthropological question that entails the production of new forms-of-life.”
“a negative anthropology of the human”
“It was the German philosopher Günther Anders who first coined this term to describe the human being as a “fundamentally unhealthy being who cannot be healthy and does not want to be healthy, that is, the undefined, indefinite being, which it would be paradoxical to want to define.”24 By emphasizing the way in which human beings are constructed by governance, Anders suggests that the human has no fixed essence, and can thus both transform itself and be transformed by its environment.”
“The book contends that the soul is not an individual property but a “commons” of the collective experience of the world, the cosmos, and the positive affects that arise when interconnections are recognized.” Note: Compare my “Generic Science” on Heraclitus. Intelligence is common.
“Dostoevsky’s works are closer to epics: they portray a utopian world of a “pure reality of souls,” a world that goes beyond nature in its opposition to culture, as well as beyond modern culture in its dualism (individual vs. community) and alienation.”
“In his notes for a never-actualized book on Dostoevsky, referenced in the Conspiracist Manifesto, Lukács gives an example of what it means to seek redemption outside the forms of the social:
The setting of the reality of souls as the only reality also means a radical shift in the sociological representation of man: at the level of the reality of souls all those fetters are detached from the soul which otherwise fixed it to its social position, class, descent, etc., and new, concrete, soul-to-soul contact takes their place.” Note: Compare Baudrillard in Seduction on the “tie” without universal.
“Lukács was particularly enthusiastic about a novel called The Pale Horse by V. Ropshin, which fictionalizes the real-life actions of a certain Ivan Kalyayev, who was part of the Socialist Revolutionary Party—incidentally, the successor to People’s Will, the group Marx was so keen to defend.”
“The final chapter of Conspiracist Manifesto bears the Olympian title “We Will Win Because We Are Deeper.”” *Note: Olympian, or in a ludic gesture, *Empyrean**
“With this nonsocial form of communism, the manifesto situates itself in a trajectory set out by Jacques Camatte with his injunction: “We must leave this world.”” Note: I say Empyrean above because of this line. Like Ranni: “To every living being, and every living soul. Now cometh the age of stars. A thousand year voyage under the wisdom of the Moon.”
“Recently, the outmoded politics that form the backbone of Andreas Malm’s green-Bolshevist agenda have wooed popular audiences by calling for acts of sabotage in defense of the earth. While such acts are entirely justified, the urgency of the ecological crisis does not magically make anachronistic organizational forms relevant again.”
“Against such nostalgic fantasies, Conspiracist Manifesto asks us to elaborate a conspiratorial ethos grounded in organizational forms more suited to present struggles.”
“its organizational model is a more open and fluid form of Blanquist cells, where partisans are careful not to close themselves off into fixed, insular groups.” *Note: Ranni and Blanqui, *The Eternity According to the Stars**
“While some may see this as a regression in the logical progression of struggle, it is worth recalling that “the conspiratorial organisations of Blanqui [gave] way to mass working-class organisations. Many of Blanqui’s followers went on to join the Socialist Party (SFIO), the majority of which, in 1920, formed the French Communist Party.””
“Alongside this conspiring, the book asks us to reconstruct habitable worlds.”
“In the twentieth century, communism named a concrete nexus of worlds one could participate in. If you were a communist in Western Europe, you could travel to Eastern Europe and learn German or Slavic languages. You could go to Cuba. You could build roads in Yugoslavia, Albania, or China. Today such worlds remain to be built.”
“Conspire, therefore. Conspire to plan a life beyond the lawlessness of market society. Conspire to invent a new form of participation in the world from out of this precarious world of war and strife. Conspire for peace, conspire for love.”
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