Communism | Marcello Tarì: Against cold politics

Leaving the present is also an affective practice and can be very stressful. Photo: Unsplash/Tito Texidor If you look at the course of history, it is obvious that revolutions end up being unfortunate. The two great revolutions of our modern history, the bourgeois revolution and the Russian Revolution, ended in Thermidor or in nationalization and Stalinism. But for Marcello Tarì these are the wrong references. His approach is more radical and finds reference to Kafka, who once wrote: “The decisive moment in human development is perpetual. That's why the revolutionary intellectual movements that declare everything that came before to be null and void are right, because nothing has happened yet." Nothing has happened yet - what could be unfortunate beyond that?

Marcello Tarì is theorist and activist of Italian Autonomia. He now presents a passionate plea for a radical reversal of revolutionary thinking: "There is no such thing as an unhappy revolution." It rejects the left's centuries-old desire to conquer state power in order to change the world. He takes a different view, one that makes existing conditions ineffective from within.

With the “destitute wealth” against the “constitutive power” the attitude of those on the left who want to prevent the slide into the coming catastrophe through reforms, micro-fights or government participation is rejected. Their struggles are aimed at seizing power to transform society. But the state and government are not neutral tools. This path is wrong for Tarì.

Against this he sets the "destitute faculty": the deposition, the abolition, the horror of leading one's own life in such a way that the dominant order loses its grip on it. Tarì is based on the Pauline figure of “as if not”: a life in this world, but in such a way that it is no longer compatible with the given world. But how can we do this without losing ourselves in inwardness? There is no longer a place in the world untouched by the system or a relationship untouched by it. We are constantly exposed to attacks from the existing. We need the action to be with ourselves. So how do we deactivate the power of existing conditions?

One thing seems indispensable: the revolution is not something that can be achieved in the future. Every reference to the future is subject to an “apocalyptic temporality” in which, also with reference to Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, the “interruption of the present” is missed. Only in the historical moment in which the revolution occurs is this temporality abolished.

What is this “interruption of the present”? First of all, every strike, every blockade, even every riot, whether we identify with it or not. The “happy revolution” is the interruption of normal operations now. When the monstrous exploitation machine comes to a standstill, when the wheels of the metropolis come to a standstill, the production and reproduction of capital are interrupted, a space of freedom, an “outside,” a liberating illegality in relation to the prevailing order emerges.

The punk slogan “No Future” stands up against its nihilistic appropriation because it no longer sees the future as an extension of the present. The radical this-worldliness makes Tarì's text fascinating and challenging. It destroys the comforting illusion of a better future and demands that happiness and freedom be realized in the here and now.

The classic factory, in which the proletariat once gathered as a large collective, no longer exists in this form. The metropolis has long been the entire factory: a huge cybernetic space that encompasses all of life. Power no longer reigns simply through the disciplining of bodies in the factory, but through the control of flows – information, goods, money and affects. In this way, modern man has become an “infrastructure,” a node in a network that constantly drains him and makes him permeable to the flow of capital.

How can one resist in such a world? Tarì answers with the commune. It is not a historical relic, but a contemporary way of life: the attempt to create an “oasis” in the desert of the metropolis in which other relationships, other affects and other forms of coexistence become possible. The commune is not simply an occupied space, but a practice of destitution. It's not about conquering and defending a territory, but rather about subverting the prevailing conditions and creating a new world inside the old one.

Commune is nothing other than the attitude of solidarity as a fundamental relationship among us. We used to call this: breaking the system of guilt and payment. Solidarity is the original form of communism. But communism is not a social system, but, as one could understand from Maurice Blanchot, a basic relationship between people based on the indelible knowledge that we are all vulnerable. This is the substance of our equality.

In order to overthrow the existing order, you not only have to fight the state, but also its roots in yourself.

For Tarì, the commune is the place where the “we” emerges: not a we based on identity or nationalism, but on the shared experience of resistance and the creation of new ways of life. Tarì knows that the commune is always at risk. But the attempt itself has value. He is not interested in “success” in the sense of permanent institutionalization, but in the intensity of the moment.

The connection between revolution and love has a special place. Here too, Tarì attacks the rationalist political concepts of the left. For him, revolution and love are structurally similar experiences: forms of destitution. In love the “I” is set aside. You lose yourself to others, give up control over yourself. Love is a “de-individualizing” experience because it shows that we are not just individuals, but part of a “trans-individual constellation.”

This is more than a poetic metaphor. It is a contradiction to cold, rationalistic politics. Leaving the present is also an affective practice. In order to overthrow the prevailing order, you not only have to fight the state, but also its anchoring in yourself. Let go and move into the unknown; “jump”, the metaphor of risk. This also means losing the fear of the consequences of a destituent life. But you can also say: There are worse existences than the one that comes with prison, because that is where the fight for ourselves is perhaps most visible.

Tarì's reflections are not without a messianic belief in the emergence of a community that, after centuries of false socialization of life, decides to turn away from it. Its core is the rejection of the linear idea of ​​progress and the idea that one has to conquer the state in order to realize the kingdom of freedom. Perhaps their conditions include the willingness to make free (self-)sacrifice out of the knowledge that everything has long been lost.

Unresolved questions that Tarì himself poses emerge here. The power of the old society is not giving up. How do we prevent the existing order from simply rolling over the communities? Asking these questions does not mean submitting to them and becoming a prisoner to the logic of constitutive power. But: Whoever wants to seize power will be seized by it. This is Tarì's verdict.

There is no certainty of victory or salvation. On the contrary: humanity as a whole has probably never been more at risk than in our time, when it is using AI to help a rational intelligence gain power that it can obviously no longer follow. The false god then enters the world. The one to truly fear.

But in everything we are faced with the question: What do we still have to lose?

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