>>567I sympathise with that sentiment and experience it often.
Have you read "Desert" on The Anarchist Library yet? It may provide some solace insofar as it reframes the question of praxis in terms of cultivating oases in the desert and seeking meaningful liberation when and where it can be made or found within a dying world that cannot be saved from its own collapse. I am critical of the essay for a variety of reasons and think that we ought to struggle against collapse in the same world-historical sense Marx described global communism, even if doing so is futile and absurd (this is where Camus' absurd rebellion comes in), but it does disrupt this false binary of either global revolution or absolute despair by acknowledging the value and meaning that can be made in the lived liberation and local communism of more transient pursuits, such as participation in temporary autonomous zones or in communal living or in mutual aid networks.
I caution that this approach can itself lull one into an antisocial escapism that is both unsustainable and uninterested in any greater societal transformation, but it is at least more practically meaningful than yet another dismal Party meeting. In that sense, even something as local and minor and nomadic as Food Not Bombs is more practically communist than
the entire Soviet Union can be more fulfilling than every single Party meeting in history. If all one does is serve vegan meals to homeless people out of a Food Not Bombs food truck, however, then is this "local communism" not itself subsumed within capitalist production and only exists insofar as capitalism permits it as a means of palliation toward the lumpenproletariat? If this communist praxis is not part of a larger world-historical one and does not even seek to participate in any such global insurrection (in the Stirnerian sense), then is this itself not simply abandoning the
real movement and leaving all such local communism vulnerable to erasure in the world-historical intercourse of Capital, just as Marx warned in the first chapter of
The German Ideology?
(Sidenote: Given that
The German Ideology was written in part as a scathingly critical response to "Sankt Max" after the publication of
The Unique and Its Property, despite Stirner's immense influence on Marx, I personally suspect that Marx's early writings on communism in its first chapter is actually a meditation on and indirect response to Stirner's insurrectionary critique of revolution. This explains why, at least to me, Marx's most explicit descriptions of communism found here so closely resemble Stirner's insurrection as opposed to revolution as conventionally understood. Marx is deeply indebted to Stirner, and had initially gave Stirner's work some of the deepest praise he ever gave of any work, including those of Hegel, in his private letters to Engels. His polemical disrespect of Stirner in
The German Ideology is more exemplary of Marx trying to work through the deeply personal and frustrating critiques that Stirner presented that it is his contempt for Stirner, though I think he fundamentally failed in that regard; nonetheless, the fact that he never published it and
The German Ideology was only published posthumously in 1932 shows the respect he still had for his former comrade.)
Regarding union (I assume you don't mean in the Stirnerian sense) and Party activities, my position is actually a bit more nuanced than I have let on in /leftypol/, where I have been ruthlessly critical of even participation in it as fundamentally anticommunist and bourgeois. I am so ruthlessly critical there because I think one
must be disabused from the notion that such activities are actually "revolutionary" or communist and part of any
real movement if one is to have any hope of contextualising these activities within a more general critique of leftist praxis. Whilst I nonetheless still maintain that position, I recognise that there can be a place for such activities in much the same way as liberal reform has its place even when it is always insufficient praxis (I take after Rosa Luxemburg in this sense). What I ultimately dispute is precisely the sufficiency of these activities – and, at least at some level, their necessity for total liberation – and the dangers they pose in distracting us from any
real movement that totally abolishes the present state of things and totally liberates all of existence therefrom, especially since these activities invariably result in all the organisational/ist problems that Jason McQuinn identifies and consequently eternally defers communism into a future that never comes in the way The Invisible Committee describe in
Now, much like how Žižek characterises charities except applied to all organisations and organisational activities.
So join or start a labour union if you still work and refuse not to, for a labour union is better than lacking one; and go to Party meetings if you still want to be engaged in organisational politics if you believe doing so is the most effective path toward concrete reforms in your area, for amelioration is better than immiseration even if it is not emancipation. Just do not mistake these activities as
real movements, at least not insofar as they radically abolish the present conditions and transformatively liberate all therefrom, however much these reforms may abolish worse straits – for now; and do not let them distract you from practicing communism in the present and intercoursing with its world-historical movement, if you have any interest in disclosing possible communist futures, lest you find yourself trapped within a recuperated reformist running wheel that never brings you closer to your emancipation from this world and condemns it absolute immiseration and collapse.
Lastly, on the matter of ataraxia, I am actually critical of such pursuits personally – beyond their escapist and antisocial nature – because I think they attempt to avoid suffering (rather than solve for it) in fundamentally death-affirming ways, thereby avoid
living in the process; I agree with Nietzsche in this regard. Moreover, it seems to deny the worthiness of struggle itself, of adversity and perseverance and overcoming as the crucibles of creation and forges of meaning, instead opting for a withering self-stultification at a cul-de-sac of lived existence that never overcomes itself. All this reeks of positivity cult dogma that uncritically affirms some conception of "happiness" as the point of life and never interrogates how fundamentally religious this spooky fetish is, effectively serving as an abandonment of the radical nihilism of Stirner and Gorgias – and active nihilist response of Nietzsche – for yet another foundational anchor to cope with the curse of existence and remedy the cosmic panic that ensues whenever these absurdities too wash away and leave one unmoored once again.
Nihilism, and the nihility of existence, is not a "problem" to "solve" or "avoid", but a
reality to
live and
practice. Ataraxic/apatheitic approaches appear to do that, yet betray themselves in their foundationalist dogmata and reduce the existence of those possessed by them to the passive nihilism all around them rather than the active nihilism that distinguishes life from (its) existence. Consequently, they themselves are diminished into mere objects in the world rather than objectors to it, those subjected to existence rather than those who subject existence to them. Is that an authentic way to live? To reduce one's life to mere existence in the pursuit of abolishing its burdens? That, to me, seems like a bad faith approach to living, for it does not
live – it merely exists in ways which avoid doing so. Living is a process of
practicing living, not the state of becoming practico-inert. If what we want is to live, rather than merely exist, then we must empty ourselves of the latter in the pursuit of the former, even if this kenosis means that we too must hang from a cross.