“Utopia, for me, is a beyond; an earthly beyond. I hesitate to say “mundane”. Because the world today identifies itself with this world: precisely what repels me and which pushes me to search for a world beyond. I feel close therefore to any transcendent measure or dimension. Without identifying with the theological forms that it takes, I find here, and I use, a form of thinking, and a form of speaking, with a political dimension, which metaphorically, or allegorically, alludes to something other than what is here, to something other than that. Even if only in this choice, there is already an antagonism. … For the time that we are living, for the contingency which we are currently experiencing, it is not possible to imagine a political utopia; we must think of a theological-political utopia. … Let us not beat around the bush and focus on this point. In the Magnificat we read: overthrow the powerful, raise the humble. Here is the theological. How to overthrow the powerful and how to raise the humble. Here is the political. And let no one come along and say: it’s too easy. It is the task of political thought to reduce the complexity of history, so that it can be accomplished not only by the one who possesses it intellectually, but also by the one who suffers from it existentially.”
(Mario Tronti, ‘Desperate Hopes’)
I’m thinking about “complicity.” We’re all feeling it, some of us disavowing our own, others far too aware of it. Complicity means “the state of being an accomplice, partnership in wrongdoing or an objectionable act,” from French ‘complicité,’ and ‘complice,’ or “accomplice, comrade, companion” (14c.), Late Latin ‘complicem,’ accusative of complex “partner, confederate,” and Latin ‘complicare’ “to fold together,” or ‘com’ “with, together” (see com-) + ‘plicare’ “to fold, weave” (from PIE root *plek- “to plait”). When you put it like that, it doesn’t sound so negative.
It also sounds all-pervading; what are we not weaved together with or folded up into? Can we ever opt out? By being at this event, I was not in Cal Anderson, and by being in Cal Anderson, I am not in Gaza, and by being in Gaza, the whole world is complicit in your demise.
There’s a song I heard recently that used an old recording from what I’m assuming were the Nuremberg Trials, where the lawyer is meant to defend an accused who has already accepted his guilt, so he does not argue for his innocence. Instead, he asked if the Vatican or Winston Churchill or American industrialists or, indeed, the whole world who read the words of Mein Kampf were also to stand on trial for allowing the Germans to “succeed” beyond their wildest dreams, reaching his rhetorical crescendo as the lyricist growls “guilty as charged.”
Are we to stand accused as well?
The forensic approach to justice is a dead-end, but it’s also a start. Every one of us is complicit: a comrade of something, an accomplice of another. Now what?
“If the conditions of capital are in the hands of the workers, if there is no active life in capital without the living activity of labor power, if capital is already, at its birth, a consequence of productive labor, if there is no capitalist society without the workers’ articulation, in other words if there is no social relationship without a class relationship, and there is no class relationship without the working class … then one can conclude that the capitalist class, from its birth, is in fact subordinate to the working class. Hence the necessity of exploitation.”
(Mario Tronti, ‘The Strategy of Refusal’)