“On Attrition” is Alberto Toscano’s afterword to Rebecca Comay’s On Persistence (Seagull Books, 2026), whose introduction—“Against Resilience”—was also published on Communis. “On Attrition” is republished with permission from Seagull, including in Spanish translation as “Del desgaste.”
“Tracing the circulation—sometimes sudden, sometimes blocked—between grief and defiance, lamentation and liberation, On Persistence also contributes to the contemporary task of redefining the ‘terms of agency’. Not just the terms but, to borrow from Abdaljawad Omar’s recent writing, its ‘burdens’—as the persistence of and in politics manifests not just as a Gramscian reciprocal siege but as faltering solidarity, as internecine fault lines and fractures, not so much contradictions as exhaustions among the people.”
—Alberto Toscano
Rebecca Comay’s On Persistence poses an intractable if uncircumventable challenge to a contemporary thinking of politics oriented towards or stemming from an idea of liberation.
In its introductory protocol and across its readings, with unrelenting nuance and appositely dark humour, she saps the foundations of a leftist common sense wedded to the precepts of a stoicism for all seasons. Persistence is hardly a stranger to the lexicons of anti-systemic thought. Whether animated by cruel optimism, belligerent hope or a pessimism purposely steeled against defeatism, many of those who have struggled against the debilitating or mortifying grip of state and capital have understood their actions not just through the symbolically sublimated language of resistance but through the prism of persistence.
Writing in 1881 in the Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine, the US socialist leader Eugene V. Debs pronounced that there was “no obstacle in the way of human desire that cannot be overcome by persistent effort”, as the lessons of nature elucidated: “Cell by cell, bit by bit, the coral insect lifted to the light of day the mighty islands of the South Pacific; not in a year, not in a hundred years, but in millions of decades. So has it been with human progress.”[1] Class struggle should take heed and harvest hope from a kind of cosmic gradualism. In an encomium to Lenin written during the First World War, the Bolshevik feminist and diplomat Alexandra Kollontai declared that the communist leader had, “like a magnet”, gathered unto himself “everything in the revolution that is expressive of will, power, ruthless destruction and constructive persistence” and that in so doing (reversing the image of patient accretion employed by Debs) he operated like “the embodiment of some natural-cosmic force pushing aside the socio-economic crust that had formed over thousands of years of human history”.[2] Persistence is here anchored not just in a will forged in conflict, tempered by hardship and tested in strategy; it is oriented towards and indeed justified by a historical horizon (which may alternatively be conceived as an imitation of natural processes or as their sovereign interruption).
Yet for Comay—who explores this disquieting hypothesis through Freud, Proust and Beckett, inter alia—persistence is not a matter of the will, implying a separability, or alternatively a full coincidence, of the social and the individual. Encore un effort is a hollow or unstable injunction when “the terms of agency need to be redefined” in keeping with the psychoanalytic insight that “the antithesis between individual and collective, between private and public, is a forced one: there is no subject that is not stretched and striated by the social, no form of sociality that has not seeped into the nerve endings of the individual”.
The political will’s historical epiphany in revolution, which might have provided a kind of focus imaginarius for a subjectivity modelled as persistence, is also unsettled in these pages—a testamentary settlement of past revolutions that would serve to secure the viability of future ones is absent. The will-volonté can neither be unified nor stabilized because the will-testament is in its turn not univocal. Comay’s coruscating meditation on René Char’s resistant dictum—Notre héritage n’est précédé d’aucun testament, which she translates-interprets as “Our heritage was unwilled”—compels us to look beyond the anniversary reactions[3] that precondition and preform our thinking of revolution and to ask whether it is not a dearth but a surfeit of political bequests, “hyper-testacy” and not intestacy, that bedevils us. Reversing Char, Comay proposes that:
It is the heritage that has gone missing, while the testamentary injunction remains in force. Switching things around a little, we might rewrite the sentence: Notre testament n’est précédé d’aucun héritage: “Our testament comes to us without a heritage.” The problem is not that the thread has broken, the family jewels scattered or inaccessible, but rather that we are overwhelmed by a surfeit of testamentary incitements. The past confronts us as a thicket of interpellations—imperatives, injunctions, promises, exhortations, excitations, obscure messages from the dead, unsigned and undated but nonetheless time-stamped and addressed to us uniquely. […] What if the testament itself were the heritage? Or even if there were no heritage, no patrimonial estate to settle, no treasure to be distributed, not even a meaning or value to be retrieved and safeguarded—only the pressure of a demand as enigmatic as it is insistent?
The predicament of persistence—with its obstinate per drawing revolution away from the fascistic returns of national rebirths, reconquistas, renaissances, and their ilk—is thus enmeshed with a condition in which (political) beginnings are never years zero, tabulae rasae or mythical originations, just as we are not given the post-historical or apocalyptic comforts of terminations without remainder. Beset by the interminable and crowded out by a palimpsest of events and their injunctions, we may thus wish to summon that “destructive character” who, “in reducing everything to rubble […] opens up unprecedented passages for transmission”. To revisit revolution as matter and manner of persistence is also, following Comay, to rethink its character as theatre and as transition, to enframe and emplot it as a stage, in her words: “[both] a spatial and a temporal station and stopping point, a platform (staticum) or arena (stadium) in which the historical antinomies of the present can be played out and displayed in their most distilled and thoroughgoing (per)form. The stage is a time and place of standstill or Stillstand.”
In the last century, when revolutionary thought tried to reflect on persistence in the key of antagonism—on persistence as and of (class) struggle—it repeatedly did so in the military language of attrition. When the foremost theorist of German social democracy, Karl Kautsky, tried to argue against the political sagacity of Rosa Luxemburg’s agitation for the mass strike in 1910, he framed his argument in terms directly borrowed, albeit without citation, from the military historian Hans Delbrück, who had written about the antithesis between the “strategy of overthrow” (Niederwerfungsstrategie) and the “strategy of attrition” (Ermattungsstrategie).[4] Attrition is defined by Kautsky in terms of mobility, logistics and subjectivity. The commander who adopts the attrition strategy “aims to keep the opposing army on the move by all sorts of manoeuvres, without giving it the opportunity of raising the morale of its troops by gaining victories; he strives to gradually wear them out by continual exhaustion and threats and to consistently reduce their resistance and paralyse them”; his strategy “requires sources of supply which are not accessible to the opponent’s army”; but above all, it “requires fighters who are not led into battle by hope of victory and spoils; who will fight for their cause, body and soul, under all circumstances, come what may”.[5] The classical topos here is Hannibal’s campaign of “overthrow” against Rome in the Second Punic War (218–201 BCE) and how it was countered by the Ermattungsstrategie deployed by Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, who thereby gained the moniker Fabius Cunctator (“the delayer”)—in which capacity he much later became the patron saint of the more reformist strain of socialism, Fabianism.[6] For Kautsky, the bloody sup-pression of the Paris Commune in 1871 marked the end of the primacy of overthrow for the workers’ movement—the storming of the capitalist citadel would only constitute, if at all, a final blow after the protracted organizational, institutional, agitational and electoral work of exhausting the class enemy. As Kautsky declared:
The strategy of attrition differs from the strategy of overthrow only in that, unlike the latter, it does not go forward directly to the decisive struggle, but prepares it for a long time, and only begins it when it knows that its opponent is sufficiently weakened. The latter must already be extraordinarily demoralized if it is to succeed in wresting from it the sources of its power without a great decisive combat.[7]
(Among the perennial questions of revolutionary strategy and ethics, viewed through the prism of persistence, would then be this: how do we not demoralize ourselves in demoralizing our foe? If the correct attitude towards the “bourgeois parties” is to “seek to weaken every one of them, to disorganize them, to undermine their self-confidence and the popular masses’ respect for them”,[8] how is this to be done without wearing oneself out in the process? Gramsci was painfully attuned to this question when he cited this passage from an 1855 article by Marx on the “Eastern Question” in his carceral notes: “A resistance too long prolonged in a besieged camp is demoralizing in itself. It implies suffering, fatigue, loss of rest, illness and the continuous presence not of the acute danger which tempers but of the chronic danger which destroys.”)[9]
For Luxemburg, Kautsky’s military analogies dissimulated a blinkered commitment to parliamentary gradualism and a misestimation of the character and capacities of the Prussian state. In the final analysis, his “avowed retention of the use of a mass strike for the single apocalyptic contingency of a ‘final battle’ in the distant future was a token clause, designed to absolve the SPD from any commitment to serious struggles in the concrete present, and to allow it to accommodate to the most mundane opportunism.”[10] However justified this latter accusation was, it is evident that the appropriation of attrition for a Marxist politics required not just a trust in the unique “tenacity and endurance” of the proletariat but a conviction in the ultimate affinity between the growth of its power and the arc of capitalist history. Only on that ground could Kautsky conclude that “we hold all the trumps in our hand, provided we know how to link inspired boldness with tenacious perseverance and coldblooded cleverness.”[11]
A handful of years later, such confidence would be critically under-mined by the carnage of the First World War and the fracturing of proletarian internationalism. And where attrition could earlier have been associated with Fabius’s proto-guerrilla harassing of Hannibal’s armies and their supply chains, it would be indelibly identified with the protracted and mechanized bloodletting of trench warfare along seemingly interminable fronts. The reputation of Kautsky’s chief source for his thinking on strategy, Delbrück, would be deeply dented by his (arguably undeserved)[12] association with the hecatomb at Verdun, as attrition came to be elided with total war and total mobilization. So, when Antonio Gramsci drew on the vocabulary of military strategy to think through the suffocating implantation of fascism and the present tasks of the workers’ and communist movements—juxtaposing an attritional “war of position” to the “war of manoeuvre”—it was with that mutation in the phenomenology of attrition firmly in mind.[13] Gramsci came to rethink politics as a kind of “reciprocal siege”, posing, counterintuitively, that the decisive questions would be resolved not in the clash of a final battle but in the persistence of antagonism.[14] What happens to the time of politics when most struggles and battles tend towards the modality of the siege, that is, towards “stages” of conflict—to recall Comay’s limning of this term—which are also “stages of temporal exception” that “suspend the ordinary pace of time” and for which delay stands as “the essential strategy of the besieged”?[15]
At the end of her introduction, Comay evokes that “other persistence, sumud, the intransigence of sheer staying power”. Responding to her interpellation, we can recall how the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish spoke of “besieging the siege”—an imperative spurred by Israel’s brutal invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and re-emerging in the siege of Ramallah in 2002. Writing against the ongoing genocide perpetrated by Israel in Gaza, the political theorist Nasser Abourahme has emphasized how critical it is not to inhabit the perspective of the besieger or to view the besieged in a logic of victimhood, sacrifice or even martyrdom. As he enjoins, “‘it would be a mistake to read the conjuncture only from the vantage point of a settler order that feels besieged and senses a way out [through the deployment of genocidal violence]. A deeper reading has to recognize that at some level this siege—the siege of the fort, the siege of the siege—is real and not just a figment of settler society’s narcissistic attachments to fears of injury and reversal.”[16]
Despite overwhelming odds and a seemingly insurmountable asymmetry in military and infrastructural power, Abourahme contends, Palestinian resistance has countered the collapse of temporality and shattering of space that marks the siege. Following long anti-colonial traditions, it has “sought to make and open time, to set its rhythms and tempos’ in a ‘time of initiative” that is neither ecstatic self-immolation nor mere delay. This has allowed, however imperfectly and episodically, reversals of the logic of the siege. But the refusal of the eliminatory terms of settler-colonial domination, what, following Fanon, Abourahme dubs “the order of colonial non-reciprocity”, cannot be reduced to the figure of a community of sacrifice. The “siege of the siege” is not a product of an obsessive, ecstatic, tragic image but of “the insistence on habitable life and its ordinary rhythms”, which resists being folded into an “image of sacrificial heroism”.[17] As Abourahme says:
The grief is immeasurable, and nothing can fold it back onto a symbolic plane. But to remove this grief from the temporality of a war of liberation is to remove it from political meaning entirely, to render it in the only language liberalism will allow: a strictly personal injury. Palestinian political community, by contrast, has always—out of sheer necessity but with political effects—hinged on its capacity to turn grief into defiance.[18]
Tracing the circulation—sometimes sudden, sometimes blocked—between grief and defiance, lamentation and liberation, On Persistence also contributes to the contemporary task of redefining the “terms of agency”. Not just the terms but, to borrow from Abdaljawad Omar’s recent writing, its “burdens”—as the persistence of and in politics manifests not just as a Gramscian reciprocal siege but as faltering solidarity, as internecine fault lines and fractures, not so much contradictions as exhaustions among the people. As Omar observes, reflecting on the meanings of solidarity and resistance amid ongoing colonial and imperial onslaughts against Iran, Lebanon and Palestine:
The burden has split along its own seam: between those who carry it as [Palestinian painter Sliman] Mansour’s porter carries Jerusalem—bent but unbroken, oriented towards something—and those who feel it as weight assigned by a history that did not consult them, borne now at a cost increasingly impossible to justify to the living. That this split runs not between enemies but between people who share a geography, a language, a wound—this is what makes it unbearable. Palestine does not allow the luxury of a clean position. It presses, insists, returns. It is the remainder that refuses to be remaindered.[19]
The remainder insists, persists. When it comes to resistance’s attritional vocation, in confrontations with seemingly incommensurate, over-whelming powers, the Black Panthers’ inspired directive, “survival pending revolution”, may find itself reversed into a call for revolution pending survival (imperatives that echo otherwise as we contend with the roiling catastrophe, the “ugly persistence” of a climate crisis whose criticality is unceasingly disavowed in the halls and echo chambers of power).
Walter Benjamin concluded his 1939 commentary on his friend and comrade Bertolt Brecht’s poem “Legend of the Origin of the Book Tao–te–Ching on Lao-tzu’s Road into Exile” by drawing out the promise and the lesson harboured in the lines, spoken by the boy leading his teacher’s ox: “That the soft water, as it moves / Vanquishes in time the mighty stone. / You understand—what is hard must yield.” For Benjamin, these lines teach us “that we should not lose sight of the inconstant, mutable aspect of things, and that we should make common cause with whatever is unobtrusive and plain but relentless, like water. Here the materialist dialectician will think of the cause of the oppressed.” But there is also another “moral” to the poem, binding persistence in mutability to the human attitude shown by the sage and the boy towards the customs man in Brecht’s poem, namely, that “Anyone who wishes to see hardness yield should not let slip any opportunity for displaying friendliness.”[20]
In one of the poems that he wrote in 1941 after learning of his friend’s death, Brecht telescoped together the strategic debates that fractured German Marxism and his memories of the chess games that he and Benjamin had played in Danish exile.
Tactics of attrition [Ermattungstaktik] are what you enjoyed
At the chessboard seated in the pear tree’s shade.
The Enemy then drove you from your books;
The likes of us? Ground down [ermatten], outplayed.[21]
Against fascism’s wars of annihilation but also against its guerres d’usure, attrition, the communist way of the water, will not suffice. At the very least, it must reform itself into an attrition without guarantees.
Perhaps then, as Comay compellingly proposes, repeating Benjamin’s own refunctioning of Pierre Naville’s surrealist injunction:[22]
The entire past must be smashed to rubble, everything must start again, including the original beginning, which therefore loses its foundational authority and ceases to be a beginning. Repetition forces a total reconfiguration of the political imaginary. It demands nothing less than a total reworking of the world. This is a melancholic, even a pessimistic, finding—we are confronted yet again with the death drive at its most vigorous—but not a defeatist one. Pessimism must be organized.
Notes
[1] Anonymous (Eugene V. Debs), “The Power of Persistent Effort”, Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine 5(1) (January 1881): 6–7. An immanent critique of this ultimately optimistic vision of persistence as socialist strategy could benefit from thinking through the place of obstinacy (Eigensinn) in Kluge and Negt’s political economy of labour power. In their commentary on the Brothers Grimm’s chilling short fable, “The Obstinate Child”, they write: “Obstinacy is not a ‘natural’ characteristic, but emerges out of destitution. It is the protest against expropriation reduced to a single point, the result of the expropriation of one’s own senses that interface with the external world.” Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt, History and Obstinacy (Devin Fore ed. and introd.; Richard Langston et al. trans) (New York: Zone Books, 2014), p. 292.
[2] Alexandra Kollontai, “A Giant Mind, a Giant Will” (1914–16) in Selected Articles and Speeches (Cynthia Carlile trans.) (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1984) (available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1914/giant.htm; last accessed on 30 April 2026).
[3] Rebecca Comay and Alberto Toscano, “Anniversary Reactions” in Berta Lask, Thomas Müntzer: Play + Commentaries (Sam Dolbear ed.; Sam Dolbear et al. trans) (Helsinki: Rab-Rab Press, 2025).
[4] The French equivalent of the latter is the guerre d’usure, the Italian guerra di logoramento; only the English “attrition”, from ad + terere, “to rub or waste away”, carries a theological meaning, as a weaker counterpart to true contrition or repentance. For an incisive treatment of the war of attrition against state-making as the neglected underside of anticolonial revolution, see Johnhenry Gonzalez, Maroon Nation: A History of Revolutionary Haiti (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019).
[5] Karl Kautsky, “The Mass Strike” in Patrick Goode (ed. and trans.), Karl Kautsky: Selected Political Writings (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1983), pp. 53–73; here, p. 54.
[6] See Perry Anderson, The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci (London: Verso, 2017), pp. 124–25.
[7] Kautsky, “The Mass Strike”, p. 56.
[8] Kautsky, “The Mass Strike”, p. 57.
[9] Quoted in Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith eds and trans) (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. 239.
[10] Anderson, The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci, pp. 125–26.
[11] Kautsky, “The Mass Strike”, p. 73.
[12] As Raymond Aron observed, “The technical side of the war—fixed fronts, trenches, avalanches of fire, thousands of deaths for a few kilometres of ground—led to the notion of attrition or Ermattungsstrategie, but in a meaning far from Delbrück’s. It was not a strategy to tire the enemy to the point of negotiating a peace, it was a strategy to dictate a peace of victory, through total exhaustion of the enemy resources. […] The strategy of Delbrück became confused with Verdun and mutual slaughter, and fell into total discredit. This was wrong. Delbrück had wanted to teach moderation in aims, both political and military, to his compatriots, so as to make negotiated peace possible.” Raymond Aron, Clausewitz: Philosopher of War (Christine Booker and Norman Stone trans) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), pp. 259, 261.
[13] Rather than Delbrück, Gramsci’s principal reference seems to have been Giulio Douhet, notorious today as an early theorist of aerial warfare and colonial “police bombing”. Douhet had emphasized the extremely novel character of a war aiming at “exhaustion produced through a long, uninterrupted tension of muscles and nerves”; the First World War was “a static war. These are not armies in battles; these are nations besieging one another”. The quotations are from Fabio Vander, “«Cadornismo politico» e rivoluzione in Occidente: Antonio Gramsci tra Caporetto e Ottobre sovietico”, Materialismo Storico 3(2) (2017): 170–79.
[14] “In politics, in other words, the war of manoeuvre subsists so long as it is a question of winning positions which are not decisive, so that all the resources of the State’s hegemony cannot be mobilized. But when, for one reason or another, these positions have lost their value and only the decisive positions are at stake, then one passes over to siege warfare; this is concentrated, difficult, and requires exceptional qualities of patience and inventiveness. In politics, the siege is a reciprocal one, despite all appearances, and the mere fact that the ruler has to muster all his resources demonstrates how seriously he takes his adversary.” Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 239.
[15] Joseph Leo Koerner, Art in a State of Siege (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2025), p. 15.
[16] Nasser Abourahme, “In Tune with Their Time”, Radical Philosophy 2(16) (Summer 2024): 13–20; here, p. 15.
[17] Abourahme, “In Tune with Their Time”: 17–18.
[18] Abourahme, “In Tune with Their Time”: 18.
[19] Abdaljawad Omar, “The Burden Assumed”, Communis (19 March 2026) (available at: https://communispress.com/the-burden-assumed/; last accessed on 30 April 2026).
[20] Walter Benjamin, “Commentary on Poems by Brecht” in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds), Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 248–49.
[21] Bertolt Brecht, “To Walter Benjamin Who Killed Himself While Fleeing Hitler”, quoted in Andrew McGettigan, “Benjamin and Brecht: Attrition in Friendship”, Radical Philosophy 161 (May/June 2010): 62–64; here, p. 64, which includes a fascinating reconstruction of their respective chess tactics.
[22] In his 1929 article “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia , Benjamin took the phrase “we must organize pessimism” from Naville’s 1926 book La Révolution et les intellectuels. See Michael Löwy, “Walter Benjamin and Surrealism: The Story of a Revolutionary Spell”, Radical Philosophy 80 (November/December 1996): 17–23.
Feature image: Detail from the cover of On persistence by Rebecca Comay (Seagul Books, 2026) © Cankarjev dom
