WHERE NO ONE KNOWS
The Revolution and Its Discontents
It is a strange moment when the revolutionary impetus encounters its own consequences. Communization arrives to us at last through a verdict long deferred. The following axiom from The Invisible Committee, published in The Call 19. states the matter with a particular characteristic bluntness we find fitting:
Communization is possible at every moment. What we call history consists solely of the roundabout means by which humans have sought to avert it.1
The injunction seems almost embarrassingly simple. Stop waiting. Stop constructing mediations (parties, states, transitional programs) and begin instead from the immediate refusal of capitalist life. In the street, on the shop floor, in the bedroom, across the network: wherever social relations reproduce themselves, there too lies the possibility of rupture!
All the more so in a time when the elaborate machinery of postponement depends, in every age, on people mistaking recognition for action. Still, history has rarely lacked for recognition. It has rather lacked acts. Every mechanism of delay ultimately depends upon the substitution of awareness for intervention and the stubborn attempt to subvert genuine diagnosis for force.
From this premise the contemporary communization current (Tiqqun, the Invisible Committee, and the wider post-autonomist milieu) derives both its confidence and its polemical edge. Its principal adversaries are those forms of radical politics that transform the prospect of rupture into an indefinitely deferred horizon.2 Whether absorbed into the circuits of academic prestige or confined to the rituals of prefiguration, they remain, from this perspective, technologies of postponement.
The trouble begins when the lexicon of liberation encounters the realities carried in its name. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the wider orbit of Iranian regime are spoken of under the single and ennobling heading of resistance. Much else is thereby permitted to pass unnoticed: the narrowing of private life, the silencing of dissent, the cultivation of fear, the infliction of torture and so on. Opposition to empire becomes the highest political good, before which all lesser tyrannies are asked to wait their turn, though they seldom do.
The deeper difficulty lies in what follows. Once these conflicts are taken as the primary key to political understanding, power is seen chiefly in terms of its place within them. The everyday realities of rule and the demands it makes, the freedoms it permits and the fears on which it relies, slip gradually from our everyday view. What remains is the larger contest and the side one is expected to take within it. Resistance, then, is merely a standard of judgment in its own right, whereby criticism survives, but within boundaries it had never set for itself.
At precisely this point, the maxim that communization remains available in every moment encounters a litmus test that recapitulates the question toward consistency. Tiqqun will later remind us that in everything one must begin with principles (Tiqqun 65). These principles acquire force, grow in pathos through the range of situations they can illuminate. The measure of a concept resides in its capacity to travel.
The difficulty comes from within the ontology itself. Immanence releases an immense political energy. Multiplicity, flight, experimentation, circulation and so on: each opens new coordinates for collective life. Yet every field of movement develops patterns, concentrations and centers of gravity.
Capital inhabits these dynamics with a remarkable fluency. Its movement consists in the continual deterritorialization of labor, of territory and identity, of all subsequent social forms inseparable from their reterritorialization within the networks of accumulation and administration.
Deleuze and Guattari warned of this danger in their writings, though the political uptake of the theory too often forgets that staying stratified—organized, signified, subjected—is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever ( Deleuze and Guattari 161). Without some structuring limit, some empty but necessary master signifier, lateral positivity is to collapse into the very libertarian eschatology it claims to escape.3 The void left behind is filled by whatever force arrives first, whether the algorithmic state, the theocratic enforcer, or the market’s invisible hand wearing the mask of critique.
We are back to Hegel. The dialectic as the immanent logic by which any position eats itself if it refuses to acknowledge its own ground. The recognition that the Big Other may be empty, yet the symbolic order it holds open remains the only space in which critique can even speak at all.
What we encounter here is the material substrate that makes the entire conversation possible. The luxury communist Hasan Piker at the Oxford Union framing Hamas as “a thousand times better” than Israel, and the apparatchik who will then publish another AI written essay on this lecture, on decolonization from the shelter of a welfare-state salary: all speak from within a cybernetic apparatus whose military and technological backbone is precisely what they denounce as imperialist.4
The same state that guarantees them their right to assemble or their broadband for their ideological streaming on their greasy devices during their trips to Cuba, not to mention all of that super convenient legal immunity, is the one whose imperialist apparatus and intelligence networks keep the Strait open, oil flowing to the power grids to light their luxury hotel rooms, and the IRGC from exporting its genocidal model unchecked. The paradox is brutal, yes, but deductive: the very conditions that allow the anti-state position to exist are the roundabout means it claims to abolish. Remove that protection and the theocracy, rather than dissolving into joyous communization, merely kills the next protestor or form of genuine resistance more effectively.
The Jewish state crystallizes every layer of this contradiction. One can reject, on principled grounds, any divine or ethnic claim that a people “deserve” a state; religion and polity must remain separate or both rot. Yet once that rejection is uttered, the same logic must be applied universally. The French, the Germans, the Italians, the Canadians and so on: none of these states rest on a metaphysical right either. Not even close. They instead rest on history, power, contingency, the same roundabout means Tiqqun apparently condemns.
To single out the Jewish polity for its immediate dissolution while simultaneously leaving every other selectively chosen state intact merely produces a new particularism carrying the universalist/post-universalist banner. The post-Shoah reality never granted anyone eternal immunity from critique. It does, however, expose the selective blindness: the same voices that demand “no state for Jews” rarely demand “no state for anyone, right now, including the Islamic Republic.”
The axiom collapses again under its own weight. Communization may be possible at every moment, sure, but the moment chosen always manages to spare the genuine enemies of sovereignty. Of the free play of forms-of-life.
Should we step back even further the picture widens into the same pattern, the larger network that sustains the entire global civil war we still have the audacity to call spectacle. American liberal capitalism and its universities, its streaming platforms, its consumer abundance and the like: modalities subsidized in real time by Chinese state capitalism; hundreds of millions lifted from poverty in one generation, factories running multiple shifts under conditions of slave labor so as to produce the very devices on which Western theorists type their condemnations of exploitation, all the while straining to decipher what Slavoj Žižek is attempting to articulate in his debate with Jordan Peterson.5
The left critiques the factory conditions from within their own state regarding their selective labor forces, the right critiques the regime and national security, citing American growth and a return of labor forces, and both sides draw moral oxygen from the other’s existence. Capital itself thrives on this mutual masturbation and calls it critique. Endless imminent crisis in which the nihilist who refuses to name the position — “I am actually comfortable inside the apparatus I denounce” — is the perfect subject of the system: empty, performative, ceaselessly producing discourse that never touches the real undercurrent. Heartless because it lacks the courage to state the actual trade-offs.
For all of this talk about revolution, and on the topic of courage, one considers Setayesh Shafiei, the unarmed twenty-year-old Iranian who, having survived growing up as an orphan and while enduring live fire amid an actively unfolding holocaust, decided to sprint thirty feet to retrieve the body of a slain twelve-year-old boy before she herself was shot dead on the spot.6 The reality of this lives of those whose refusal cost them exactly that is almost always lost on the purposeful ignorance of the West. As though anyone reading along has had to burry their child in their backyard garden, merely to spare the corpse from being held for ransom by the state.7
Everyday life for an Iranian exists within a reality absent any critical distance from the same global crisis; they face an existential, violent theocracy that claims to govern them in the name of religion, culture, divine purpose — in the name of biopower and domination. Anti-war sloganeering by contrast presupposes a neutral ground that does not exist outside of the market place, globalized capital and geopolitical power blocs. Westerners who stand behind utterances: “no to war,” “no war but class war” et al, have chosen infamy, they have refused the free play of forms-of-life, rejected sovereignty, exteriority, negativity, and autonomous subversion. Behind their pseudo-altruism exists the worst kind of war, a war wage in the name of peace! Tiqqun again.
The desire for an immediate separation from value, with wage, with every form-of-life that reproduces domination remains as true as ever, but this impetus must be carried through these paradoxes rather than around them. That would mean admitting three things at once: the state is domination; some states currently make critique survivable while others do not; and pure multiplicity without any structuring limit is the fastest route to new dominations and unfreedom.
The desire for an immediate separation from value, with wage, with every form-of-life that reproduces domination remains as true as ever. But this impetus must be carried through the paradoxes rather than around them. That would mean admitting three things at once: the state is domination; some states currently make critique survivable while others do not; and pure multiplicity without any structuring limit is the fastest route to new dominations and unfreedom.
The cybernetic apparatus is both prison and shield, much in the way the Jewish question is a test of universal principle and a reminder that history was never meant to arrive with clean hands. If we are to take ourselves seriously at this point, we must insist on the more difficult kind of honesty about protections and the limitation around our material conditions.
The task for anyone still loyal to the revolution is to stop pretending otherwise, and to begin the far harder work of thinking the break without lying about the ground on which one stands.
Invisible Committee. The Call. 2004. Translated by Lawrence Jarach, The Anarchist Library, theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-call. Accessed 4 June 2026.
Tiqqun. Conscious Organ of the Imaginary Party: Exercises in Critical Metaphysics. Unofficial English translation, Oct. 2011, files.libcom.org/files/Tiqqun1.pdf.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Piker, Hasan. Address to the Oxford Union (livestream). Oxford Union Society, 6 June 2026. (The statement that Hamas is “a thousand times better” than Israel was reiterated and defended in the context of this event; see also The Guardian, “Leftwing US pair refused entry to UK will address Oxford Union remotely,” 3 June 2026.)
Žižek, Slavoj, and Jordan Peterson. “Happiness: Capitalism vs. Marxism.” Debate, 19 Apr. 2019, Sony Centre for the Performing Arts, Toronto.
[6] WNCRI. “Setayesh Shafiei, The Girl Who Was the Sun.” World News on Christian Resistance in Iran, 4 June 2026, wncri.org/2026/06/04/setayesh-shafiei/.
[5] BBC Persian. “Iran Protests: Authorities Demanding Large Sums for Return of Bodies.” BBC News, 15 Jan. 2026, www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g5md1n1yxo.