Debray goes to Vietnam, or FOQUISMO focuses on Vietnamese praxis

[Sam R.]

Wotcher.

Urban foqo bullshit is a meme beloved by historians: from the useless assassination of US generals in Germany, to the Kidnapping of Prime Ministers in Italy, foquismo proved itself to be dilletante intelligentsia 19th century German Idealist bullshit. And Regis Debray is worth blaming here. Put five German marxists in a room together with some guns and watch them fuck up the possibility of a working class movement.[1] While BR may have managed an episode of Big Brother, autonomia and the left of the CP in the factories managed to take the Italian state to the wall using far more "conventional" working class tactics against governability.

Debray, then, seems to have been as fundamentally influential on praxis as his educator Althusser.

But such does not need to be so. And being good Engelsian historians we ought to look to the margins and the working class for real innovation. Such as the innovations in assassination and political murder from the VWP as the Viet Minh or the Viet Cong (PLAF/NFL). The Vietnamese communists used assassination as a way of deactivating the state's capacity for most effective governmentality (allow me to explain.) States exist as the capacity for people to pre-emptively follow their declared conducts (such as laws.) They also exist as the soft conduct enforcement of education, health, benefits, postal services, etc. (don't do drugs kids.). They also exist as the immediate repressive apparatus of the state. They exist as johnny plod cuntstable, and as the prime minister. They exist as health service intellectuals theorising provision, and as the poor sod on the dole office window. The Vietnamese figured out in the 1945-1975 period who to kill, how, and where. Largely they targetted and terrorised the middling parts of fortune, where not enough money was on offer to die (like being prime minister), but where there wasn't an infinite replacement pool (like conscript johnny). For the NFL, they perfected murdering people politically for ends: take the middle out of the sandwich.

What if Althusser sent Regis Debray to North Vietnam, who could then smuggle him into South Vietnam as they did Wilfred Burchett (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfred_Burchett#Vietnam). What if Debray managed to make a hackneyed depiction in french intellectual terms of the NFL's operations regarding the middle men of fortune, and export this to the French, Italian and West German student movements in time for their more insipid stupidity.

What if Vietnamese _c_ommunists informed West German _C_ommunists of how to correctly conduct class war before they fucked up in public? What if West Germany had an ultraleft more effective towards the Italian model of autonomia. Not perhaps in their initial politics before they being testing, but in their resilliance in the face of the state.

yours,
Sam R.

[1] I have it on authority that there was the equivalent of the US "Radical Amerika" and shop floor embedment movements in Germany. That the non RAF persons are still unarrested says something perhaps more about FOQO than the general opinion on small armed actions in the advanced countries.

 

[Canuck Wingnut]

Do you want a more effective assassination campaign, or more resilience in the face of state opposition? These aren't technically mutually contradictory, but in general successful assassination campaigns tend to harm the elements of effective insurgency- especially popular support. Even among the working classes, the state's agents provide some level of security- if only in terms of repressing violence and enforcing predictable routines. Killing them, therefore, tends to alienate the working class (and other classes, who recognize that they themselves or their family members could be such state agents even more so). In general, successful insurgencies build up popular support, and then 'spend' it on tactics like assassination (or other forms of action, violent or nonviolent) which weaken the state without strengthening the insurgency.

 

[Sam R.]

Do you want a more effective assassination campaign, or more resilience in the face of state opposition?

Well, I never get what I want . But I just some time might get what I need. Unlikely though.

But this is Debray so he's going to be fixated on the "spending," instead of the "earning." If he didn't pay attention to how they earnt in Cuba, he won't pay attention to how they earnt in the RVN. But if Debray gets "Kill the middle, kill the competent, kill the hated," drilled into his head it'll make FOQO madness ever so slightly more effective before it gets shut down when the 50 state sponsored middle class university students get Gaoled.

The effect may be, however, that the German ultraleft underground outside of Foqo targets slightly better, or that Autonomia and / or the BR target slightly better. It may also change the spend/earn structure. Fewer US Generals, more Academics running stupidly hard courses, etc. Vietnam won't get a german ultraleft to go to the factory.

Now admittedly the latter won't cause state collapse in the BRD or Italy, but the former will mean that violent tactics are remembered differently in the West, with less fetishisation and a greater generalisation of efficacy. Compare to by 1990 where "non-violence" was a central tenet of self-organised Western lefts.

(I don't think I've got anywhere to go with this, but Debray to Vietnam rather than Cuba sounds interesting).

yours,
Sam R.

 

[SealTheRealDeal]

Debray is captured and water boarded for 96 hours straight by ARVN Special Forces, afterwhich he is transfered to American custody wherein he is MK Ultra'd into bombing the SED.

More seriously: the RAF is still a joke trying to implement a model irrelevant to the West German context. The nobility's estates have already been broken up and redistributed meaning their is no super majority of landless peasants to mobilize, and the German government is somewhat less despised than the assortment of drug dealers, pimps, and power mad generals governing South Vietnam after 1963.

 

[Sam R.]

Debray is captured and water boarded for 96 hours straight by ARVN Special Forces, afterwhich he is transfered to American custody wherein he is MK Ultra'd into bombing the SED.

Burchett made it in, in to the capital region political operations area, and out, but we all know how compliant, easy to deal with, and quiet Australians are. Didn't know they waterboarded people in the 1960s, thought Phoenix was more traditional, and while the ARVN special forces were exceptional, a special guest sent by the French party is likely to be protected as well as Burchett.

More seriously: the RAF is still a joke trying to implement a model irrelevant to the West German context. The nobility's estates have already been broken up and redistributed meaning their is no super majority of landless peasants to mobilize,

Except this isn't the Vietnamese model. French proletarianisation through religious enclosure and salt-taxation had eliminated the peasantry in Vietnam by the 1940s, and the second wave of land distribution which created the RVN in the 1950s further proletarianised the Southern village, particularly rice bowl villages. You can't get the kind of political discipline which the NFL got out of vietnamese rural workers out of a peasantry.

Now this is *equally* irrelevant to Western red diaper university students with some factory connections in West Berlin and the industrial centres. And Debray may (it is Debray: will) misinterpret what caused the ICP / NFL's successes historically.

and the German government is somewhat less despised than the assortment of drug dealers, pimps, and power mad generals governing South Vietnam after 1963.

I'd even go for significantly, but as I've noted in each prior post there were successful movement which engaged in physical violence against the West German system with the heros/criminals still unarrested. Debray will, typically, fuck up his reading of the Vietnamese, but a more coherent Foqo will partly influence the successfully unprosecuted young working class movements in Western Germany, and probably in Northern Italy. Not necessarily to their benefit compared to historically.

 

[Seandineen]

Debray is captured and water boarded for 96 hours straight by ARVN Special Forces, afterwhich he is transfered to American custody wherein he is MK Ultra'd into bombing the SED.

More seriously: the RAF is still a joke trying to implement a model irrelevant to the West German context. The nobility's estates have already been broken up and redistributed meaning their is no super majority of landless peasants to mobilize, and the German government is somewhat less despised than the assortment of drug dealers, pimps, and power mad generals governing South Vietnam after 1963.

I think this kind of destruction, might lead to Ky and Thieu, making up, and creating a real government of national unity, focused on national survival, The economy is taking off.

 

[MildSeven]

Burchett made it in, in to the capital region political operations area, and out, but we all know how compliant, easy to deal with, and quiet Australians are.

I cackled.