Re: <nettime> The Revolutionary Role of a Transnational Counterparty

[Dmytri Kleiner <dk@trick.ca>]

On 01.11.2011 19:11, Snafu wrote:

> But when you elect a class of professional politicians, it is unlikely
> that they will abdicate their power to other bodies as their legitimation
> (and income) derives from the bourgeois institutional structures the
> Transnational Counterparty is meant to deny.

I don't deny the challenge, and agree with the risks, but as mentioned 
earlier, the risks are now a fact if we are do depend our the 
plutocrats' party for our representations. A debtors' party could not be 
worse. And yet, perhaps these risks can be avoided or mitigated in ways 
that have not been tried before, by, for instance, having candidates for 
election contractually bound to forfeit their position on the demand of 
the membership.

> Conversely, when social movements have organized in revolutionary
> committees, these bodies have invariably formed the core of the
> society-to-come.

And yet, for these bodies to change society they must also develop the 
sort of dialectic form that I propose, wether by intention or 
imposition, for the simple reason that their their intrinsic 
characteristics are disharmonious with the environment they exist in, 
and remain dependent on. They must develop extrinsic characteristics for 
survival within an external environment that doesn't share their 
internal form.

The very fact these committees are forms of class conflict, require 
these unavoidable extrinsic characteristics to be created, the 
committees could not do anymore than demonstrate without them, and even 
for demonstation, there are hidden extrinsic interfaces, as their 
survival to demonstrate is funded diffusely by sympathetic wage-labour 
in the external economy, and not from internal production. For example, 
using your paycheque to buy supplies for the symbolic occupation is 
already an example of an antithetical process, yet OWS could exist 
otherwise.

If we are to transform society on a bigger scale, transforming such 
central features such as how education, child care, health care and 
housing are socially provisioned, we can only do so by understanding 
that transformative structures must have a dialectic form, because they 
are intruments of class conflict, and thereby decide to choose to create 
our extrinsic form, rather than only react to it's inevitable 
imposition.

Engagement with the actually existing government in our society is one 
of those external relationships we will be unable to avoid,The form of 
the government and it's system of parties is not an option, only how we 
engage with it, by forming our own representation, or begging such from 
others.

> Hence, the notion that an organized revolutionary body will dissolve itself
> is as delusional as the transitional notion of the dictatorship of the
> proletariat.

I'm not proposing that the Transnational Counterparty "dissolve 
itself," in the process of the transformation of society it's intrinsic 
form will become the form of society itself, what will vanish is it's 
extrinsic characteristics, which will vanish because the external 
structures that necessitated them will have vanished.

Best,

--
Dmyri Kleiner
Venture Communist


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