Episode 5.5: Revolutionary Motives
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Join us for a discussion of Jasper Bernes’s contribution to Endnotes 5, a treatment of proletarian motives vs interest that examines the theoretical framework of game theory.
Read the essay here: https://endnotes.org.uk/file_hosting/EN5_Revolutionary_Motives.pdf
Episode 5.4: Contours of the World Commune
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The Friends of the Classless Society intake to Endnotes 5 is a straight-up piece of social fiction, discussing in great detail how a communist utopia would function. It is quite satisfying on an immediate level to read such a detailed piece of utopian social imagining, and our discussion in this episode ranges quite widely.
Support the show on Patreon if you like the content and get access to our Discord to join the conversation. https://patreon.com/theinvertedform
(you can also send me a DM on any platform and I’ll send you the link.)
Read the essay here: https://endnotes.org.uk/file_hosting/EN5_Contours_of_the_World_Commune.pdf
Download the mp3 here: https://umt.world/wp-content/uploads/ep5.4.mp3
Subscribe to the RSS here: https://umt.world/category/footnotes-to-endnotes/feed
Episode 5.3: Error
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How does the revolutionary insert themselves into the capitalist totality? What kind of totality is capitalism, anyway? It has a definite beginning, but is it possible that it is logically determined to stretch into infinity? How do we extricate ourselves from this totality? As a totality based on a particular mode of production, capitalism can be located in its physical residue—infrastructure in the form of technology and architecture. Is technology neutral in the class struggle? We enter into all of this and more via a discussion on contemporary COVID politics and some reflections on the past summer, and what might come of the second summer of the Pandemic Age.
If you want to join in on the conversation, support us on Patreon to get access to our Discord: https://patreon.com/theinvertedform
(or, alternatively, send me a DM or email.)
Read the essay here: https://endnotes.org.uk/file_hosting/EN5_Error.pdf
Episode 5.2: We Unhappy Few
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We read and discuss the first proper essay in the fifth volume of the Endnotes journal, “The Passions and the Interests.” This essay, “We Unhappy Few,” breaks the fourth wall and reflects on the experience of the Endnotes as a collective. The major innovation in terms of theory is the introduction of Wilfred Bion’s theories of group psychology, which bring in a whole new theoretical palette to the journal’s theorization so far. The essay is long and, surprisingly, quite optimistic.
Read the essay here: https://endnotes.org.uk/file_hosting/EN5_We_Unhappy_Few.pdf
Listen on YouTube: https://youtu.be/fwEKsqV5w9M
Episode 5.1: Editorial / State of the Pod
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A loose episode where we break off the fifth edition of the Endnotes journal, discussing the very short editorial; most of our time is given to discussing the future of the podcast.
Support us on Patreon: https://patreon.com/theinvertedform
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/euMjcM89lqk
Send me a DM if you want access to the Discord.
BONUS EPISODE: Friends of the Classless Society
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In this episode, we are reading and discussing two essays from the Berlin communiser group Friends of the Classless Society. We spend a fair amount of time recounting a history of 20th century revolution that we are all familiar with at this point; we also discuss Adorno and his idea of a “classless class society,” as well as some of his ideas on culture.
Support the show on Patreon and get access to our Discord: https://patreon.com/theinvertedform
(you can also send me a DM on any platform and I’ll share the link.)
On Communisation and Its Theorists: https://endnotes.org.uk/other_texts/en/friends-of-the-classless-society-on-communisation-and-its-theorists
28 Theses on Class Society: https://kosmoprolet.org/en/28-theses-class-society
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/kHlR8rj750c
BONUS EPISODE: One Year Pandemic Anniversary
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Breaking from the format of the show for a bit, in this episode we are not discussing a primary text, but rather reflecting on the past year of pandemic life, what possibilities remain open to us, and how it relates to this project in particular.
BONUS EPISODE: Theses on the Council Concept
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This essay from the New Institute for Social Research explores the concept of the council, originating out of the “council communist” tendency, which is closely related to communisation. A lot of this essay is given over to a form of “social fiction,” wherein the author tries to imagine how the council, as a relational process, would be the form of complex social organisation in a post-revolutionary future. We enter into the topic via the concept of the “mega-machine,” taken from the Deleuze and Guattari’s book “Anti-Oedipus.” And we spend some time ourselves imagining how a post-revolutionary communist utopia might appear.
Read the essay here: https://isr.press/Theses_on_the_Council_Concept/index.html
Support the show on Patreon and get access to our Discord: http://patreon.com/theinvertedform
(our send me a message on any platform and I’ll share the link.)
Download the mp3: https://umt.world/wp-content/uploads/ep26.mp3
Subscribe to the RSS: https://umt.world/category/footnotes-to-endnotes/feed
BONUS EPISODE: Crisis and Immiseration: Critical Theory Today
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Before we get into volume 5 of the Endnotes journal, we are going to take some time to read a few assorted essays to round out our understanding of the communisation current. In this episode, we are reading a contribution by John Clegg and Aaron Benanav, two members of the collective, to a collection on the Frankfurt School. The essay covers familiar territory, focusing on surplus populations, capitalist crisis, and worker’s identity; but there are a few turns of phrase that articulate these familiar Endnotes talking points really well, and could potentially make the essay good reading material for people who want a deeper understanding of the matter.
Read the essay here: https://cominsitu.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/BenanavandClegg-CrisisandImmiseration-SAGEHandbook.pdf
Support the show on Patreon and get access to our Discord: https://patreon.com/theinvertedform
(You can also send me a DM on any platform.)
Episode 4.8: An Identical Abject-Subject?
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Wrapping up Endnotes 4 with this follow-up and clarification to the standout essay from Endnotes 2, “Misery and Debt.” The function of this essay is to clarify that the “surplus population” should NOT be misunderstood as containing any hopeful elements of an organizational, revolutionary subject.
Support the show on Patreon: patreon.com/theinvertedform
If you want access to our Discord research community, just send me a DM on any of the platforms linked below.
Read the essay here: https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/4/en/endnotes-an-identical-abject-subject
Download the mp3: https://umt.world/wp-content/uploads/ep4.8.mp3
Subscribe to the podcast: https://umt.world/category/footnotes-to-endnotes/feed
Episode 4.7: Its Own Peculiar Decor
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This intake to Endnotes 4 is an analysis of urbanism, from the Debordian perspective that capitalism has successfully managed to collapse space in the form of the suburb, the greenfield, the urban metropole. This essay begins with that analysis, but takes it further afield by analyzing the history of housing and urban development in the United States, how it plays into processes of racialisation as well as the eradication of the worker’s identity.
Listen on YouTube: https://youtu.be/SvFi76cbDtQ
Read the essay here: https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/4/en/chris-wright-its-own-peculiar-decor
Reminder that we have our own Discord research community. If you want to join, simply support us at any level on Patreon: https://patreon.com/theinvertedform
(or you can send me a DM and I’ll send you the link.)
Episode 4.6: Gather us From Among the Nations
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In this episode we talk about Hegel, we discuss Endnotes’s essay on the wave of riots that swept through Eastern Europe in early 2014, and we focus in again on the “composition problem.” One of the key theoretical points made in the essay under review is that the problem of a lack of demands is identical to the “composition problem,” but that the former can be seen in a positive light–a movement’s lack of demands leaves it open to the possibility of full-on communist insurrection. We continue to puzzle over what communization might mean, and get even deeper into its logos.
Read the essay here: https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/4/en/endnotes-gather-us-from-among-the-nations
Support us on Patreon if you like the show and want us to keep going: https://www.patreon.com/theinvertedform
If you want an invite to our Discord, you can support us on Patreon (or you can just send me a DM on some platform or other).
Episode 4.5: The Rise and Fall of the Worker’s Movement, 1883-1982 (pt 3)
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Wrapping up our long episode on this long history on the history of the worker’s movement, as well as discussing the stonks kerfuffle in the news. We reflect on internet culture and its possibilities for a future mode of consciousness; the Endnotes corpus thus far; and a lot more!
Remember that we have a Discord community (DM for an invite) and a Patreon where you can support the show. https://www.patreon.com/theinvertedform
Read the essay here: https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/4
Download the mp3 here: https://umt.world/wp-content/uploads/ep4.3.mp3
Subscribe to the RSS feed here: https://umt.world/category/footnotes-to-endnotes/feed/
Episode 4.4: The Rise and Fall of the Worker’s Movement, 1883-1982 (pt 2)
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Our second episode on the long essay in Endnotes 4 on the history of the worker’s movement. Join us for another discussion that runs the gamut, from discussing billionaires, neo-feudalism, the Avatar remakes, to the early decades of the worker’s movement.
Remember that we have a Discord community (DM for an invite) and a Patreon where you can support the show. https://www.patreon.com/theinvertedform
Read the essay here: https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/4
Download the mp3 here: https://umt.world/wp-content/uploads/ep4.3.mp3
Subscribe to the RSS feed here: https://umt.world/category/footnotes-to-endnotes/feed/
Episode 4.3: A History of Separation—The Rise and Fall of the Worker’s Movement, 1883-1982
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Join us for a wide-ranging discussion as we get into Endnotes’s epic history of the worker’s movement, from its roots in the 19th century and the proletarianization of the peasantry, to the “communizing turn.” We are discussing the preface and the first part of the essay.
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/4qt58c1ihMc
Read the essay here: https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/4
Download the mp3 here: https://umt.world/wp-content/uploads/ep4.3.mp3
Subscribe to the RSS feed here: https://umt.world/category/footnotes-to-endnotes/feed/
Remember, if you want access to the Discord, just send me a DM or an email.
Support the show on Patreon!!! https://www.patreon.com/theinvertedform
Episode 4.2: Brown v. Ferguson
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Endnotes are back on their journalistic kick, tracing the history and contours of the Ferguson uprising circa 2014. Connecting it to its immediate history of police killings and the social movement that mobilized around them, to the more distant history of the civil rights movement, as well as the material history of the construction of cities like Baltimore and St. Louis. The key theoretical concepts that we focus in on are the “composition problem,” as well as the theory of “surplus populations.”
Enjoy, and remember to subscribe to the Patreon to get access to our Discord (or just send me a DM)!
Read the essay here: https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/4/en/endnotes-brown-v-ferguson
Episode 4.1: Editorial / State of the Pod
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After a month of bonus episodes, we are getting into volume 4 of the Endnotes journal, “Unity in Separation.” At the same time, we are sharing some exciting updates to the show and spend some time thinking about the future of this podcast.
The piece we are discussing is just a short editorial introducing the book and re-iterating the critical analysis of capitalism’s death-throes from the previous volume.
Read the essay here: https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/4/en/endnotes-editorial-4
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/kRqtH6Z15ls
Support the Podcast! Subscribe to our Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/theinvertedform
Remember, we now have a Discord community. If you’re interested in joining, just send me (theinvertedform) a DM.
BONUS EPISODE: Mapping the European Commie-scene with Ben Noys
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Professor and editor of Communization and its Discontents Benjamin Noys joins Uriah for a discussion on today’s episode of the pod. We’ve read a few essays on the pod, and for this discussion we take Endnotes’s critical appraisal of Tiqqun / The Invisible Committee as our starting point. We cover the political and cultural context in the UK at the time of the group’s splinter from the journal Aufheben; we cover the intellectual milieu in France and Italy at the same time, before getting into the precise differences between the anarchist and the Marxist tendencies of communization theory. In the end, we assess the contemporary legacy of these two different publications, and their impact on anti-capitalist struggle.
We have a lot more interviews lined up in the New Year, and we will finally have a way for fans of the show to support us on Patreon. Subscribe to the YouTube channel, where I release videos (nearly) daily: https://www.youtube.com/c/theinvertedform
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/e8CCEss9xyw
You can subscribe to the show with this RSS feed: https://umt.world/category/footnotes-to-endnotes/feed
Check out Ben’s writing here: https://chi.academia.edu/BenjaminNoys
Download the reader, where you’ll find his introduction as well as Endnotes’s contribution: https://libcom.org/library/communization-its-discontents-contestation-critique-contemporary-struggles
BONUS EPISODE: The Gender Distinction in Communisation Theory
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Another bonus episode before we get into volume 4 in the new year, continuing the discussion from last week, and the discussion that started from The Logic of Gender essay in Endnotes 3. This time we are reading P. Valentine’s 2012 contribution to the LIES Journal, coming out of Oakland / elsewhere. This is a critical intervention to the communisation tendency, especially the conversations happening around gender. An outsider perspective that directs its critique inward, toward the movement in a confrontational and polemical manner–much different from Endnotes’ tendency to direct its critique outward, toward easy targets like the police and the state.
BONUS EPISODE: Communization and the Abolition of Gender
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Reading another essay from the Communization and its Discontents reader, edited by Benjamin Noys. This one is by Maya Andrea Gonzalez, “revolutionary Marxist feminist” and a member of the Endnotes collective. She is also the author of the essay from vol. 3 The Logic of Gender. In this work from a few years prior, Gonzalez traces a materialist history of gender relations under capitalism, connecting them to the communizer’s theory of revolution as an im-mediated practise of abolishing social relations, the most fundamental being the gender divide. Like Endnotes and many other communization groups following in the wake of TC, a point of disunity is taken to be a principle of overcoming: in this case, it is the disunity of the gender, and the bifurcation of human activity into productive and reproductive spheres, that will provide for the abolishment of capital.
BONUS EPISODE: Tending the Revolutionary Garden with Jasper Bernes
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In this bonus episode, Uriah sits down with Jasper Bernes to discuss his essay from vol. 3 on logistics and its follow up, focusing on questions of agriculture and technology. We discuss Marx’s concept of the metabolic rift, permaculture, planning and logistics, reparations, and more. Leave a comment, hopefully we will have more guests on the show coming up soon.
Read The Belly of the Revolution here.
Listen to our episode on the logistics essay here.
BONUS EPISODE: What are we to do?
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This is a first in a series of bonus episodes that we will be putting out before diving into volume 4 of the journal. We are reading the essay authored by the Endnotes collective, included in the reader “Communization and its Discontents,” edited by Benjamin Noys and published by AK Press in 2012. The text largely a critical reflection on The Invisible Committee’s book, The Coming Insurrection, which represents a distinct brand of communisation theory. As opposed to Endnotes’s communist communisation, The Invisibile Committee / Tiqqun represent an anarchist-insurrectionist tendency that has not aged nearly as well as Endnotes’s writing.
Episode 3.7: Spontaneity, Mediation, Rupture
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Wrapping up volume 3 of Endnotes with a meditation on the relationship between the nature of anti-capitalist struggle, the role of militants in realizing that struggle, and what struggle can hope to accomplish. This essay further advances a definition of communisation, and develops the collective’s vision for the conditions of possibility of a communist revolution. It ends on a very intriguing cliffhanger, too, arguing that class consciousness is not a sufficient basis for revolution, but that capital is really the one thing we all have in common.
Episode 3.6: The Limit Point of Capitalist Equality
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This week’s essay is another intake, this time from Chris Chen. We are discussing race and identity politics. The essay argues that “race” is a process of socio-economic interpellation, in contra-distinction to identity politics which seeks to affirm racial identity. The author develops an anti-racist practise within the materialist framework of value-form theory. Instead of affirming identity, anti-racist practise should seek to abolish race by abolishing the social forces which impose it onto racialized categories of the population.
Episode 3.5: Logistics, Counterlogistics and the Communist Prospect
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In this very special episode recorded on Halloween, and released on the eve of the American presidential election, we are discussing Jasper Bernes’s (outsidagitator?) essay on the history of logistics. Posited as capital’s theory of its own globalized form, the essay situates us in 2011, the same moment of historical upheaval this entire collection of essays has focused on. We discuss the concepts of “cognitive mapping” taken from Frederic Jameson, “hydraulic capitalism” taken from Deleuze and Guattari, Heideggerean ontology, technological alienation, and more.
Episode 3.4: A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats
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This week we are discussing the riot wave that burned throughout England in 2011. Precipitated by anti-austerity protests and anti-police brutality protests, Endnotes explore the myriad social movements that coalesced in days of protests, arson, property damage, and violence directed toward cops, and toward protesters from the cops. Sound familiar? The parallels to the riot wave that swept the United States this summer are striking, and the predictable of this long, well-researched historical essay is that riot waves of are always the result of an extended historical process. Developing from this, we discuss the historical continuity of tactics employed by insurgents–as well as repressive tactics employed by the police.
Watch on YouTube (link goes live on 11:45am EST, Monday 26 October).
Episode 3.3: The Logic of Gender
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How do you fit the gender/sex binary into the framework of value-form theory, and the method of systemic dialectic? Listen to this week’s episode to find out, our first episode recorded virtually, and Endnotes’ first sustained foray into Marxist feminism.
Episode 3.2: The Holding Pattern
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This week on the podcast we are going back to 2013 and discussing the Occupy Wall Street movement, the “movement of the squares” internationally, and all the explosions of worker’s movements of that period. We go back and forth about the utopianism of the Endnotes collective, and arrive at a better understanding of just what “communisation theory” really entails.
Episode 3.1: Editorial
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Breaking off a new edition of the Endnotes journal. This survey text previews what’s ahead. We reflect on the historical circumstances of this publication (2013), on the issue that we just finished, what we like and don’t like about Endnotes, and what’s to come.
Episode 2.7: Sleep-Worker’s Enquiry
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This week we are finishing off the second edition of the Endnotes journal with a reflective meditation on the working life of a programmer. We discuss the politics of the software industry, the logic of technology, and how it all relates to capitalism.
Episode 2.6: The History of Subsumption
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This week we are discussing the historiography of class conflict. Endnotes critically analyse the Marxist category of subsumption, originating in Kant and Hegel. Kant uses the concept in his epistemological distinction between synthetic and analytic; Hegel extends it to the metaphysical subsumption of one subject to another. Finally, Marx uses the concept into a materialist critique of capitalist social relations, where labour is subsumed by capital. Endnotes establish their critical position in relation to the contemporary literature of Antonio Negri, Jacques Camatte, Theorie Communiste, and the legacy of “programmatism” (Leninism).
Episode 2.5: The Moving Contradiction
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This week’s episode of the Footnotes to Endnotes podcast is on the essay “The Moving Contradiction.” The theme continues building the same methodological and theoretical premises the Endnotes collective have been outline over the course of this issue, this time at a much more abstract level. Our verdict is that this essay is “bad,” repetitive, and so we use it instead as a a point of departure for a more free-form conversation about Marxism, communism, the revolution, theory…everything we’ve been discussing in the series so far, but without being beholden to the text.
Listen to the podcast on YouTube.
Thumbnail is a detail from a highly macabre altarpiece you can see here.
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Episode 2.4: Communisation and Value Form Theory
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Best episode of the podcast yet, a wide-ranging exploration of the theoretical history of communisation theory, and value form theory. In this essay, Endnotes elaborate why they have attached themselves to these two contemporary Marxist and communist theories, and begin to advance their argument about why the two are related.
Read the essay by Endnotes here.
Episode 2.3: Notes on the New Housing Question
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Episode 3 of the Footnotes to Endnotes podcast. This episode discusses the history of housing in the United States over the course of the 20th century, and analyzes how the housing market was intimately connected to post-war “New Deal” policies. A major topic in this episode / essay is the requirement of state-managed capital to increase the individual debt load, in order to integrate them into the housing market; as well, the racial dynamics that were at play, as informed by and determinate of the housing market.
Thumbnail is a painting by Kandinsky.
Episode 2.2: Misery and Debt
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In this week’s episode of the podcast, join Uriah and Owen as they discuss and analyze the left-communist text “Misery and Debt,” published in 2010 by the Endnotes Collective. This is one of the most important essays in contemporary Marxian economics that has emerged after the 2008 crisis, and provides an invaluable corrective to 20th century bourgeois arguments against the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
Learn more about important concepts like simple reproduction and expanded reproduction, surplus population, the industrial reserve army, and what it means that profit inevitably declines within the capitalist system over time.
Episode 2.1: Crisis in the Class Relation
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Owen Gilbride and I have been recording a new podcast, discussing every essay in the Endnotes series. We are beginning with Endnotes no. 2 “Misery and the Value-Form” because I didn’t order no. 1.
The first episode of the podcast is out now. You can add this URL to your podcast apps. You can also watch on YouTube (don’t forget to subscribe). The essay under review can be read here.
As with everything good, we are doing this for our own edification.
The music in the show is by Owen, a prolific musician–check out more of his music here–and I am very grateful for his engineering skills.
The thumbnail shows a detail from Hilma af Klimt’s “Altarpiece,” the first in her “Group X” series of paintings. It because it seems to represent the ascension to mystical heights of knowledge that you will undergo by listening and subscribing to this podcast.
If you have any feedback, we are both all ears. Drop me a line on Twitter, or send me an email. Owen is much more difficult to contact.