Petrol posted:

There is an interesting essay in one of the books I posted in the conspiracy thread called 'The Spectacle and the Partisan' by Jeff Kinkle.

Let’s start with a simple question: how does a partisan determine who their enemy is? For the autochthonous defenders of the homeland this is relatively straightforward. In the case of the Spanish guerrilleros battling Napoleon’s army, the partisan was simply defending their homeland, their soil, their people and the enemy was the invader, the other. For the global revolutionary, the situation is a bit more complex, but Schmitt claims that it was Lenin’s cognizance of the enemy and his ability to clearly articulate this that was the secret of his enormous effectiveness. Not being able to determine friend from enemy is disastrous. It threatens the very concept of the political, which is not merely about martial conflict but the ability of a group to collectively identify their friends and enemies.

The political does not reside in the battle itself, which possesses its own technical, psychological, and military laws, but in the mode of behaviour which is determined by this possibility, by clearly evaluating the concrete situation and thereby being able to distinguish correctly the real friend and the real enemy.

This does not mean that any two groups can “objectively” be each other’s enemy—“each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence”—but how can this be determined with anything approaching certainty under the integrated spectacle?

i want to write a reply to this post in the what're you reading thread addressed to Some People who are concerned about determining friends and enemies.

i think this is wrong, for the simple reason that schmittian categories are a fundamentally bad fit for for any actual revolutionary movement. schmittian categories are not only the "point of view of the state", they are also fundamentally reactionary themselves.

as a contrast to what kinkle says, i would like to quote ishay landa on schmitt:

The Apprentice's Sorceror posted:

Many analyses of Schmitt’s works are handicapped by insufficient attention to the historical specifi ity of such texts. Thus, rather than someone who was grappling with an acute historical conundrum, the menace of mass democracy in a very specific time and place from the standpoint of the upper classes, Schmitt is oft en discussed as if he was a detached political scientist deftly juggling such abstractions as politics, liberalism, democracy, will of the people, and so on. Such synchronic notions are then extracted from their original context and projected onto our own times. This prevalent idealistic attitude was prefigured by Paul Hirst, when Telos was still happy to call itself “a nice leftist journal” (Piccone and Ulmen 1987: 3): “Because thinking about concrete political situations is not governed by any dogmatic political alternative, it exhibits a peculiar objectivity” (Hirst 1987: 16; italics added). This idealism is compounded by an interrelated lack of awareness of the fundamental esotericism of Schmitt’s rhetoric; there is very little willingness to consider the possibility that Schmitt was not wearing his heart on his sleeve. Instead, interpreters recurrently take him at face value: an unwise thing to do, when dealing with one who belonged to two groups of people not exactly known for their guilelessness: a fascist, to start with, and a fascist lawyer, to boot. We thus need to contextualize Schmitt, who was operating not in our social and political constellation but in his, which was drastically different.

Schmitt underlined the powerlessness of political liberalism to cope with democracy, specifically mass democracy, and consequently the need to break out of this impasse by recourse to dictatorship, that would establish once and for all who is the sovereign, who is the one who can decide on the Ausnahmezustand, the state of emergency (literally: state of exception), and define the relevant “friend-enemy” groupings. The entire set of fundamental questions raised by Schmitt and the wellknown answers he provided, derived from this historical predicament. And since Schmitt approaches this quandary as a jurist and grapples with the legalistic implications of the move to dictatorship, he becomes the personification of the upper classes’ dilemma explained by Engels and Gumplowicz, that sees them legally confined within the—politically liberal—straitjacket they themselves ordered made. “The parties of order,” according to Engels (1895), “are perishing under the legal conditions created by themselves, . . . in the end there is nothing left for them to do but themselves break through this dire legality. . . . Breach of the constitution, dictatorship . . .!” And for Gumplowicz, the bourgeoisie finds “the yoke of legal logic about its neck and must submit to its ideas,” until, “from this unbearable condition,” it appeals “to the despotic might of reaction” (1899: 149–150). The straitjacket is thus torn asunder, and Schmitt, quite from within the system, indeed from its very headquarters, provides an exquisitely erudite and sophisticated juristic counsel on how to do so. Schmitt was not the ultimate outsider portrayed by liberals, not a sworn enemy of liberalism, nor a “peculiarly objective” observer, but one of those upper-class travellers on board the liberal vessel, who was made anxious by the stormy waters of mass democracy and driven to consider what might best be ditched to get the ship steadied. Overboard goes political liberalism.

this is why trusting schmitt on lenin, and what made lenin successful, seems like a dire error to me. these categories of "friend and enemy" are actually at best second order phenomena to what really proved fundamental to lenin's success: building the most flexible and democratic revolutionary organisation in russia at the time. this is why they were the only party to support immediate peace! this is why they were the only party to present slogans and arguments that were wholly in step with where the people were at the time. lenin didn't succeed by identifying social categories to be subjected to terror: those social categories volunteered for terror by themselves.

this gulf in understanding applies to other situations; take the chinese revolution. the determination of "friend and enemy" didn't occur on this schmittian, pre-ordained basis at all; yet again, those subjected to terror volunteered themselves.

as the rest of the dual state quite rightly notes, schmitt's categories are not for the revolutionary but for the state. italian investigative journalists and social democrats and christian democrats are not volunteering themselves as enemies; they are identified as such by the fascist sovereign, and eliminated well before they prove a threat to the constituted power.

and there is a further problem: the idea of "criminality" escapes entirely schmitt's vision (because he doesn't care about it). lenin and other revolutionaries won because they were fighting to end, bluntly, injustice and theft. the sovereign wins because they are effective at maintaining power at any cost, a quest which has absolutely nothing to do with ending the continuous, bloody theft of capitalism. indeed, schmitt's label of "the partisan" strikes me as an attempt to put the communist fighter on the same level as the capitalist bandit; never mind the fact that the capitalist bandit reaches for the gun immediately as a means of political control, whereas it is the last, risky resort for the communist fighter.

jools posted:

those social categories volunteered for terror by themselves.

caro...

Petrol posted:

good OP. on reflection i think that schmitt has been shoehorned into a very interesting article which has more to do with debord. id like to address this point:

jools posted:

the idea of "criminality" escapes entirely schmitt's vision (because he doesn't care about it). lenin and other revolutionaries won because they were fighting to end, bluntly, injustice and theft. the sovereign wins because they are effective at maintaining power at any cost, a quest which has absolutely nothing to do with ending the continuous, bloody theft of capitalism. indeed, schmitt's label of "the partisan" strikes me as an attempt to put the communist fighter on the same level as the capitalist bandit; never mind the fact that the capitalist bandit reaches for the gun immediately as a means of political control, whereas it is the last, risky resort for the communist fighter.

i get what you're driving at here but i would personally rather appeal to notions of morality than criminality. the problem with criminality as a concept is that it relies on law that does not exist. capitalism is always excepted from those laws which criminalise the revolutionary. of course, it's possible to imagine some kind of natural law, but this is a nonsense, and a dangerous one in the context of revolution, which is suffused with passion. morality might seem more slippery or ill-defined, but it needn't be. in fact, the simpler moral questions probably hold the greatest potential as a point of unification for the left.

good post on morality vs criminality. i guess i had a couple of things in mind with my choice:

1) the way a new law is proclaimed at the beginning of some revolutions (eg t he french); the lack of such (at least in a clear fashion) in some later ones honestly seems a mistake to me. marx's criticism of the paris commune even could have been answered to an extent with that.

2) i want to think beyond a strict divide between revolution and everything else as i worry concentrating on the former as this single Event rather than a process promotes bad messianic thinking. the bolivarian revolution, or the nicaraguan revolution, or really a lot of third world revolutions, are much much better thought of in terms of process rather than event. and its worth noting, in many of those cases, how politics actually proceeds once sovereignty was won through war and struggle (the Event Revolutionaries, ie, romantics, see this as the point where everything should have been fixed - see ex-leftist disappointment with algeria particularly here). i think the politics of the big european Communist parties during the cold war shouldn't be entirely dismissed here as an example to critique and learn from too! we should be more gramscian.

e: and this isnt to say people on this forum arent, by and large, in the way they engage with actual things going on, like how people here generally understand "anti-imperialism" and so on. i just think its important to be consistent on how these things work.

Edited by jools (Sept. 21, 2014 06:15:31)