unPoliceYrMind

"Each time someone makes a statement about antagonism to the cops as “alienating,” and therefore bad for a movement, we should always respond: alienating to whom? Because such a statement always implies a fundamental political position. Sure, that antagonism is alienating to liberals, conservatives, some of the working class, most of the middle class, all of the ruling class. But not to those whose lives have been always marked by the hostility of the police. Because the mention of “peace” and making peace with the police is not neutral. It is equally alienating to the poor, the not-white, the non-citizen, the jailed, the haters of capital and society. Such is a basic uncrossable divide. One has to pick a side. And to side with those who think that social upheaval has anything to do with changing public policy or getting votes, with those who have a material stake in defending this order, would be the worst mistake we could ever make."

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In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx writes, ‘Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at the most, time’s carcass.’ This appears, initially, as just a conveniently catastrophic metaphor. However, we might read it in three ways.

1
In the loosest interpretation, that takes it primarily as a ramped up modifier of the preceding sentence concerning how ‘one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour,’ man is ‘time’s carcass’ insofar as man’s specificity is killed, leaving man a carcass animated by value and made to labor, simply a unit of potential activity subordinated to labor time.

2
If we recall the particularity of form and content in Marx, however, we approach a different perspective, a trajectory sketched in a single sentence. The active development, via laboring of man as labor power (the content)150 produces the material conditions for labor time (the form). However, the perversity of capital is that this form does not remain adequate to its content. It becomes divorced from it and increasingly autonomous. But this is not the story of a form that simply takes leave from its originary content and ‘becomes everything,’ simply dominant. Rather, it comes to determine the content in a constant passage back and forth, to force it to accord with the development of that form: any opposition between form and content becomes increasingly incoherent. As such, man is time’s carcass in that living labor power is valued only in accordance with its form: it is that form, fully developed into the general equivalence of value, alone which is of worth. Man, the original source of that form, is a husk dominated by an abstraction with no single inventor. Form fully reenters and occupies the content as if it were dead matter, incapable of generating further adequate forms. And when it is productive to do so, time makes those bones dance.

3
Man – or rather, the human as more than the common man of capital – is that which is born in the death of time. It is the leftover of the collapse of capital, and it is the faint prospect, in the decomposition of the dominant social relation (the representation that mediates between labor power and labor time), of an existence that outlives capital.

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"That denial reaches right up to the pinnacle of the local political food chain: Michele Bachmann, who stayed silent on the suicide cluster in her congressional district for months – until Justin’s mom, Tammy Aaberg, forced her to comment. In September, while Bachmann was running for the GOP presidential nomination, Aaberg delivered a petition of 141,000 signatures to Bachmann’s office, asking her to address the Anoka-Hennepin suicides and publicly denounce anti-gay bullying. Bachmann has publicly stated her opposition to anti-bullying legislation, asking in a 2006 state Senate committee hearing, “What will be our definition of bullying? Will it get to the point where we are completely stifling free speech and expression?… Will we be expecting boys to be girls?” Bachmann responded to the petition with a generic letter to constituents telling them that “bullying is wrong,” and “all human lives have undeniable value.” Tammy Aaberg found out about the letter secondhand. “I never got a letter,” says Tammy, seated in the finished basement of the Aabergs’ new home in Champlin; the family couldn’t bear to remain in the old house where Justin hanged himself. “My kid died in her district. And I’m the one that presented the dang petition!” In a closed room a few feet away are Justin’s remaining possessions: his cello, in a closet; his soccer equipment, still packed in his Adidas bag. Tammy’s suffering hasn’t ended. In mid-December, her nine-year-old son was hospitalized for suicidal tendencies; he’d tried to drown himself in the bathtub, wanting to see his big brother again."