SIC - International Journal for Communisation

Can we find alternatives to the failed radical projects of the twentieth-century? What are the possible forms of struggle today? How do we fight back against the misery of our crisis-ridden present?"Communization" is the spectre of the immediate struggle to abolish capitalism and the state, which haunts Europe, Southern California, and wherever the real abstractions of value that shape our lives are contested. Evolving on the terrain of capitalism new practices of the "human strike," autonomous communes, occupation, and insurrection have attacked the alienations of our times. These signs of resistance are scattered and have yet to coalesce, and their future is deliberately precarious and insecure.Bringing together voices from inside and outside of these currents Communization and Its Discontentstreats Communization as a problem to be explored rather than a solution. Taking in the new theorisations of Communization proposed by Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee, Théorie Communiste, post-autonomists, and others, it offers critical reflections on the possibilities and the limits of these contemporary forms, strategies, and tactics of struggle.Contributors include: Alberto Toscano, Nicole Pepperell, Anthony Iles, Marina Vishmidt, Evan Calder Williams, Jason E Smith, Théorie Communiste, Endnotes, Jasper Bernes, John Cunningham, George Ciccariello-Maher, and Alexander Galloway.

Misery and the Value Form 1. Crisis in the Class Relation Taking the capitalist class relation as a self-reproducing whole, the horizon of its overcoming appears as an invariant aspect of this whole, albeit one with a historically variant quality. Surplus population and capital's basic problem of labour characterise core dynamics underlying the shift in this horizon beyond the old programme of workers' power. 2. Misery and Debt A re-reading and historical interpretation of Marx's “general law of accumulation”— the tendency for the expanded reproduction of capital to throw off more labour than it absorbs—in light of the growth of surplus populations and surplus capital in the world today. 3. Notes on the New Housing Question Preliminary materials for a theory of home-ownership, credit, and housework in the post-war US economy. How is the fundamental separation between production and reproduction transformed when the home becomes the commodity through which all others are sold? 4. Communisation and Value-Form Theory The theory of communisation and Marxian value-form theory emerge from the same historical moment, mutually complement each other, and point towards the same radical conception of revolution as the immediate transformation of social relations, one in which we cease to constitute value and it ceases to constitute us. 5. The Moving Contradiction A reconstruction of the systematic dialectic of capital as a dialectic of class struggle. The forms of value which are constituted by and regulate social practice are totalising and self-reproducing through the subsumption of labour under capital. The totality so constituted is inwardly contradictory, and ultimately self-undermining: capitalist accumulation is a moving contradiction, i.e. a historical contradiction, between capital and proletariat. 6. The History of Subsumption The philosophical/logical concept of subsumption is employed in various periodisations of capitalist society, such as those of Théorie Communiste, Jacques Camatte, and Antonio Negri. A critical examination of this concept and its historical uses. 7. Sleep-Worker’s Enquiry Worker's enquiry in the cynical mode: the unrevolutionary working life of the web developer.

Issue 2, February 2014   The second issue of the Sic journal is now available.You can order copies here.   Not an Editorial Woland, The Uneven Dynamics of the Era of Riots Leon de Mattis, Communist Measures R.S., The Conjuncture Woland, Rise of the (Non-)Subject R.S., The Movement Against the French Pension Reform Rocamadur, The Feral Underclass Hits the Streets Rust Bunny Collective, Under the Riot Gear Research & Destroy, Limit Analysis and its Limits Agents of Chaos, Without You, Not a Single Cog Turns