The South Atlantic Quarterly 113:2, Spring 2014

doi 10.1215/00382876-2643567 © 2014 Duke University Press

Werner Bonefeld and John Holloway

Commune, Movement, Negation: Notes from Tomorrow

These have been years of refusal, of massive, multitudinous No!’s exploding in one country after another. Cities rise up, unexpectedly, unpre-dictably, as revolt leaps from one side of the globe to the other like a drunken grasshopper. Stock-holm one week, Istanbul the next, then Rio de Janeiro and São Paolo, then it is the turn of Sofia, then Cairo, and by the time this essay is published the list will certainly be capable of being extended for several lines more.

Often these uprisings are provoked directly by the implementation of austerity policies (Ath-ens, Madrid), but they can be sparked by almost anything—by the plan to destroy a park (Istanbul), the raising of bus prices (São Paolo), or a police shooting (London and more than forty towns in England). Always responses to particular aggres-sions, they quickly spill over into a more general scream of refusal. We say no to a world in which Progress means Destruction, Poverty, Obscen-ity, no to a world in which richness is measured in money.

These are No!’s to be celebrated, but also to be reflected upon. Wonderful explosions of energy, they often last little longer than a firework dis-play. They have been met by repression and in

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some cases by institutional integration. There is a healthy sense of confusion mixed with the anger of the revolts. What do we want, what are we doing, where are we going, can we get there, wherever it is? Some people think they know the answers, of course, and are happy to follow the well-trodden paths to failure that have become so familiar over the past hundred years. It is the others who interest us, those who do not know, those who scratch their heads and think as they rush forward onto the streets screaming no.

What does it mean to say no? That is the question that is at the core of this collection, that is the question we sent to all the contributors. Is it enough to say no? How can we go beyond saying no? Who are we to say no? The dif-ficulty of the no has been perhaps most succinctly focused by Herbert Mar-cuse in his statement that slaves “have to be free for their liberation so that they are able to become free.” In other words, the slaves can free themselves only insofar as they are not slaves, on the basis of their nonidentity. The struggle for freedom is a struggle that not only turns against the visible enemy but also pushes against and beyond ourselves. Perhaps this can help us understand why in all these struggles there are two noes: an identitarian, institutional no that, despite its fury, still hesitates to tell capitalism to go to hell, and an anti-identitarian no that stumbles forward, struggling to leave slavery behind forever and create a different way of living. The excitement, our excitement, is in those who stumble forward, heads full of questions. But then how do we relate to the other no, how do we make sure that the dif-ferences do not become destructive?

Each wave of struggle confronts theory with its own limitations, forces us to recognize that we do not know the answers, that we have to think afresh. For this reason, each wave of struggle brings a new wave of theory: G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology as the response to the French Revolution, Karl Marx’s Capital as the product of 1848 . . . and now this collection of essays that among many, many others is part of a much wider attempt to understand and par-ticipate in the no to the capitalist social relation that is bouncing around the world.

This editorial collaboration is our first in twenty years, a joyous occa-sion. We now live on different sides of the Atlantic, and our collection brings together authors from both Europe and the Americas, including some who have jumped from one side to the other, in different directions. There is a strong sense of sharing the same revolt, but in different conditions and with different experiences. Our drunken grasshopper knows no national bound-aries, but it learns something in each place it lands and passes it on in the next. Athens learns from Buenos Aires, Madrid from Athens, Istanbul from

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Madrid, and so on. A painting emerges, as each revolt takes up a brush and adds strokes of different colors, all red. The red of anger and, through that anger, the red of communism, so often dismissed and now resurging. Not the Communism of the Communist States, so dead, so well dead, but the experi-mental communism of councils, of assemblies, of communes, of squares, of occupy’s, of horizontalism, of recovered factories, of cooperative farms and community gardens. Communism as communizing, a process that moves forward asking and thinking and writing the essays of this collection. And this painting on which we now daub our collective brush has a name. And its name is Tomorrow, Perhaps.