Διαβάζοντας το θεμελιώδες έργο του Αποσπάσματα μιας Αναρχικής Ανθρωπολογίας (2004), μαζί με το μεταθανάτια δημοσιευμένο magnum opus του Η Αυγή Των Πάντων: Μια Καινούρια Ιστορία Της Ανθρωπότητας (2021), το οποίο έγραψε μαζί με τον αρχαιολόγο David Wengrow, θα ήθελα να ασχοληθώ με τον David Graeber ως έναν ανθρωπολόγο των ανθρώπινων δυνατοτήτων. Ο Graeber δεν ήταν με καμία έννοια μελετητής του αναρχισμού, αλλά, με τα δικά του λόγια, «ένας μελετητής που προσυπογράφει τις αναρχικές αρχές και περιστασιακά ενεργεί σύμφωνα με αυτές, αν και συνήθως με αρκετά περιορισμένους τρόπους» (2020).

Η αφοσίωση του Graeber στις αρχές του αναρχισμού τροφοδότησε το ακαδημαϊκό του έργο μέσω της πεποίθησής του ότι τα ανθρώπινα όντα (θα) μπορούσαν να οργανώνουν συλλογικά την κοινωνική και πολιτική τους ζωή με διαφορετικό τρόπο – στο παρελθόν, το παρόν και το μέλλον – και ως μελετητής, επινόησε, αρχειοθέτησε και ανέλυσε αυτού του είδους τις ανθρώπινες δυνατότητες.

Αρχικά, ο Graeber εμπνεύστηκε να γίνει ανθρωπολόγος ακριβώς λόγω αυτών των δυνατοτήτων. Η ανθρωπολογία τον απορρόφησε, «επειδή το αντικείμενο ανοίγει παράθυρα σε άλλες μορφές κοινωνικής ύπαρξης· επειδή λειτούργησε ως μια συνεχής υπενθύμιση του ότι τα περισσότερα από αυτά που θεωρούμε ως αμετάβλητα, έχουν διευθετηθεί σε άλλους χρόνους και τόπους με αρκετά διαφορετικό τρόπο, και ότι ως εκ τούτου οι ανθρώπινες δυνατότητες είναι σχεδόν με κάθε τρόπο μεγαλύτερες από ό,τι συνήθως φανταζόμαστε» (2007). Πρώτα απ’ όλα, λοιπόν, προσέγγισα το ακαδημαϊκό έργο του Graeber ως μια ανθρωπολογία των ανθρώπινων δυνατοτήτων. 

Οι Δυνατότητες μιας Αναρχικής Ανθρωπολογίας

Δημοσιευμένο το 2004 μέσα σε ένα εμπνευστικό πλαίσιο μιας πραγματικής έξαρσης του αναρχισμού σε όλο τον κόσμο, τα Αποσπάσματα μιας Αναρχικής Ανθρωπολογίας του Graeber (θα αναφέρεται εδώ και στο εξής ως Αποσπάσματα) είναι ένα μικροσκοπικό και πανίσχυρο κείμενο που δύσκολα μπορεί να μπει σε κάποια κατηγορία συγγραφικού είδους. Ο Graeber το αποκαλεί μπροσούρα, «μια σειρά από σκέψεις, σχέδια ενδεχόμενων θεωριών και μικρά μανιφέστα» (33)². Η μπροσούρα αυτή είναι αδύνατο να συνοψιστεί και να παρουσιαστεί πλήρως μέσα σε λίγες σελίδες, όχι μόνο λόγω της αποσπασματικής φύσης της, αλλά κυρίως επειδή φαίνεται εκ των υστέρων πως εμπεριείχε τους σπόρους πολλών από τα κύρια επιχειρήματα που ο Graeber επρόκειτο να αναπτύξει αργότερα στη ζωή του. Ως εκ τούτου, θα περιοριστώ στο να σκιαγραφήσω ορισμένα βασικά στοιχεία του είδους της κοινωνικής θεωρίας που προτείνει ο Graeber σε αυτό το ζωηρό κείμενο. Σε γενικές γραμμές, τα Αποσπάσματα επιδιώκουν να σκιαγραφήσουν ένα σώμα ριζοσπαστικής θεωρίας που, σύμφωνα με τα λόγια του Graeber, «θα μπορούσε πραγματικά να ενδιαφέρει αυτούς που προσπαθούν να βοηθήσουν στην ανάδυση ενός κόσμου στον οποίο οι άνθρωποι θα είναι ελεύθεροι να αυτοκυβερνώνται» (43). Αυτό είναι χαρακτηριστικό του Graeber: η επιθυμία να καταστεί η κοινωνική θεωρία – ιδιαίτερα η ανθρωπολογία – χρήσιμη για τα ριζοσπαστικά κινήματα, και αυτά με τη σειρά τους – ιδιαίτερα ο αναρχισμός – να καταστούν χρήσιμα και ενδιαφέροντα για την κοινωνική θεωρία. 

Στα Αποσπάσματα, ο Graeber διερευνά αυτό που ονομάζει «περίεργη συγγένεια» ανάμεσα στην ανθρωπολογία και τον αναρχισμό (46). Παρατηρεί ότι «υπήρχε κάτι στην ανθρωπολογική σκέψη, εν προκειμένω, η έντονη συναίσθησή της για το τεράστιο εύρος των ανθρώπινων δυνατοτήτων, που την έκανε να συγγενεύει με τον αναρχισμό από την αρχή κιόλας» (46). Ο ίδιος ο Graeber γοητεύτηκε από αυτό το εύρος των ανθρώπινων δυνατοτήτων στο παρελθόν και το παρόν, το οποίο θα μπορούσε να καταρρίψει το φαινομενικά αναπόφευκτο των σημερινών κοινωνικών και πολιτικών μας θεσμών, θεμελιώνοντας την ελπίδα για μια συλλογική ζωή με περισσότερη ελευθερία και με πιο ισότιμους τρόπους οργάνωσης. 

Ο Graeber στα Αποσπάσματα είναι σε θέση να παρατηρήσει την παράξενη συγγένεια μεταξύ ανθρωπολογίας και αναρχισμού, επειδή στη δική του εκδοχή του ο αναρχισμός δεν είναι απλώς το πνευματικό παιδί συγκεκριμένων «ιδρυτικών μορφών» του δέκατου ένατου αιώνα όπως ο Μπακούνιν, ο Κροπότκιν και ο Προυντόν, και που κάποιος θα έπρεπε να υιοθετήσει εξολοκλήρου. Αντίθετα, πρόκειται περισσότερο για μια συγκεκριμένη στάση, ακόμη και μια πίστη που μοιράζονται μεταξύ τους τα άτομα στον αναρχικό χώρο (36). Ο αναρχισμός μπορεί να θεωρηθεί ως πίστη, ισχυρίζεται ο Graeber, στην οποία περιλαμβάνεται «η απόρριψη ορισμένων τύπων κοινωνικών σχέσεων, η πεποίθηση ότι κάποιες άλλες σχέσεις είναι καλύτερες για το χτίσιμο μιας βιώσιμης κοινωνίας, [και] η πίστη ότι μια τέτοια κοινωνία μπορεί πραγματικά να υπάρξει» (36). Ομοίως, οι «ιδρυτικές μορφές» του αναρχισμού δεν σκέφτονταν σαν να είχαν είχαν ανακαλύψει κάτι ιδιαίτερα καινούριο (35). Απλώς έκαναν μια υπόθεση καλή τη πίστει ότι, σύμφωνα με τα λόγια του Graeber, «οι βασικές αρχές του αναρχισμού, (αυτοοργάνωση, εθελοντικός συνεταιρισμός, αλληλοβοήθεια), αναφέρονταν σε μορφές της ανθρώπινης συμπεριφοράς που θεωρούνταν δεδομένο ότι υπήρχαν από τότε που υπήρχε και η ανθρωπότητα. Το ίδιο ισχύει και με την απόρριψη του κράτους και όλων των μορφών δομικής βίας, την ανισότητα ή την κυριαρχία» (36). Αναμφισβήτητα, είναι αυτή η υπόθεση περί της ανθρώπινης ιστορίας για την οποία το βιβλίο η Αυγή των Πάντων επιχειρεί να αποδείξει την εγκυρότητά της δεκαεπτά χρόνια αργότερα. 

Σε κάθε περίπτωση, στο όραμα του Graeber η ανθρωπολογία ως αντικείμενο θα μπορούσε να ενισχύσει την πίστη στη δυνατότητα ενός άλλου κόσμου προσφέροντας ένα αρχείο εναλλακτικών τρόπων οργάνωσης των κοινωνικών σχέσεων, συνειδητής ανασύστασής τους ή πλήρους εγκατάλειψής τους. Αλλά για να μπορέσει να ενισχύσει αυτή την πίστη για τη δυνατότητα ύπαρξης ενός άλλου κόσμου απαλλαγμένου από «το κράτος, τον καπιταλισμό, τον ρατσισμό και την πατριαρχία» (43), η ίδια η κοινωνική θεωρία θα πρέπει να υποθέσει ότι ένας άλλος κόσμος είναι εφικτός. Στην πραγματικότητα, ο Graeber ισχυρίζεται ότι αυτό είναι η πρωταρχική υπόθεση που η κάθε ριζοσπαστική κοινωνική θεωρία οφείλει να κάνει. «Το να αφοσιωθεί κανείς σε μια τέτοια αρχή είναι σχεδόν μια πράξη πίστης», βρίσκει, «μιας και πώς μπορεί κάποιος να είναι σίγουρος για τέτοια ζητήματα; Μπορεί κάλλιστα να αποδειχθεί ότι ένας τέτοιος κόσμος δεν είναι εφικτός» (43). Σε μια κίνηση που μοιάζει με ένα εξελιγμένο θεολογικό επιχείρημα σχετικά με την ύπαρξη του Θεού, δηλώνει στη συνέχεια ότι «είναι αυτή ακριβώς η μη διαθεσιμότητα απόλυτης γνώσης που κάνει μια δέσμευση στην αισιοδοξία, ηθική αναγκαιότητα» (43). Ωστόσο, αναρωτιέμαι αν άλλοι ανθρωπολόγοι ή μη μπορούν να παρασυρθούν σε μια τέτοια καλή τη πίστει αισιοδοξία μέσω της επιχειρηματολογίας. Ίσως κάποιος θα μπορούσε να εμπνευστεί να έχει πίστη στη δυνατότητα ύπαρξης ενός άλλου κόσμου με τον ίδιο τρόπο που και ο David Graeber ενέπνευσε τα ριζοσπαστικά κινήματα που εκτιμούσε πολύ. 

Η δεύτερη πρόταση του Graeber είναι ότι κάθε ριζοσπαστική κοινωνική θεωρία και ιδιαίτερα η αναρχική θα πρέπει να αποβάλλει συνειδητά οποιοδήποτε ίχνος πρωτοπορίας (45). Κατά τη γνώμη του, «η εθνογραφική πρακτική ως ανθρωπολογική μέθοδος παρέχει κάτι που μοιάζει με μοντέλο, αν και πολύ ακατέργαστο, πρωτόλειο, μοντέλο, για το πώς μια μη πρωτοποριακή, επαναστατική διανοητική πρακτική μπορεί να λειτουργήσει» (45). Ο στόχος μιας τέτοιας πρακτικής δεν θα ήταν να «καταλήξει στην ορθή στρατηγική ανάλυση και μετά να ηγηθεί των μαζών» (45), αλλά να συλλάβει πώς συνήθειες και πράξεις των ανθρώπων βγάζουν νόημα με τέτοιο τρόπο που ούτε οι ίδιοι δεν είχαν εντελώς συνειδητοποιήσει (45). Ο ευνόητος ρόλος για ένα ριζοσπάστη διανοούμενο είναι να κάνει ακριβώς αυτό», γράφει ο Graeber στα Αποσπάσματα, «να εξετάζει αυτούς που δημιουργούν βιώσιμες εναλλακτικές λύσεις, να προσπαθεί να υπολογίζει ποιες μπορεί να είναι οι ευρύτερες συνέπειες του τι (ήδη) πράττουν και ύστερα να προσφέρει αυτές τις ιδέες πίσω, όχι ως συνταγές, αλλά ως συνεισφορές, δυνατότητες – ως δώρα» (46). Όχι συνταγές, αλλά συνεισφορές, δυνατότητες, δώρα. Αυτά προσέφερε ο Graeber στο έργο του – ιδιαίτερα στα Αποσπάσματα μιας Αναρχικής Ανθρωπολογίας (2004), Άμεση Δράση: Μια Εθνογραφία (Direct Action: An Ethnography) (2009) και Το Δημοκρατικό Σχέδιο: Ιστορία, Η Κρίση, Το Κίνημα (2013) – τα δώρα του είτε έγιναν αποδεκτά είτε όχι από αυτούς για τους οποίους έγραψε, από αυτούς που σκέφτηκε και έδρασε μαζί, ή από όσους τον διάβασαν. Εξάλλου, τα δώρα μπορούν και να απορριφθούν, και όπως αναγνώρισε ο Graeber, πολλά από αυτά που πρότεινε ή έκανε ως ανθρωπολόγος δεν είχαν «ιδιαίτερη σχέση με αυτό που υπήρξε η ανθρωπολογία, ακόμη και η ριζοσπαστική, τα τελευταία περίπου εκατό χρόνια» (46).  

Παρ ‘όλα αυτά, στα Αποσπάσματα ο Graeber στρέφεται σε ανθρωπολόγους και κυρίως στον Marcel Mauss για να ασχοληθεί με την επιρροή του στους αναρχικούς, παρά το γεγονός ότι ο Mauss δεν είχε τίποτα καλό να πει γι’ αυτούς. «Τελικά, παρόλα αυτά», γράφει ο Graeber σαν να μιλάει και για τον εαυτό του, «ο Marcel Mauss είχε πιθανότατα μεγαλύτερη επιρροή στους αναρχικούς απ’ ό,τι όλοι οι άλλοι [ανθρωπολόγοι] μαζί. Αυτό διότι ενδιαφερόταν για μια εναλλακτική ηθική, πράγμα το οποίο τον οδήγησε να σκεφτεί ότι οι κοινωνίες χωρίς κράτη και αγορές υπήρχαν, έτσι όπως υπήρχαν, επειδή οι άνθρωποι ενεργά επιθυμούσαν να ζουν με αυτόν τον τρόπο. Όπερ σημαίνει: επειδή ήταν αναρχικοί. Στο βαθμό που τα αποσπάσματα μιας αναρχικής ανθρωπολογίας υπάρχουν, κατά ένα μεγάλο μέρος προέρχονται απ’ αυτόν» (56). Κατά τη γνώμη μου, το ενδιαφέρον του ίδιου του Graeber για την ανάπτυξη μιας αναρχικής ανθρωπολογίας δημιουργήθηκε επίσης από την εκτίμηση που έτρεφε για την «εναλλακτική ηθική» και για τη γοητεία που αυτή του ασκούσε, ηθική που στηρίζει την αυτοσυνείδητη αποφασιστικότητα των ανθρώπων να ζουν διαφορετικά – στην αναρχική περίπτωση, ελεύθεροι από τον καπιταλισμό και την πατριαρχία, ελεύθεροι από το κράτος, τη δομική βία, την ανισότητα και την κυριαρχία.  

«Αυτό είναι, λοιπόν, που εννοώ λέγοντας εναλλακτική ηθική», εξηγεί ο Graeber σε ένα κριτικό τμήμα των Αποσπασμάτων, όπου θεωρητικοποιεί την επαναστατική αντιεξουσία και προαναγγέλλει ένα βασικό επιχείρημα που θα συνυπογράψει στην Αυγή των Πάντων: «Οι αναρχίζουσες κοινωνίες δεν αγνοούν περισσότερο τις ανθρώπινες ικανότητες για απληστία και ματαιοδοξία από ό,τι οι σύγχρονοι Αμερικανοί την ανθρώπινη ικανότητα για φθόνο, λαιμαργία ή οκνηρία. Θα τις έβρισκαν εξίσου ακατάλληλες ως βάση για τον πολιτισμό τους. Στην πραγματικότητα, αντιλαμβάνονται τα φαινόμενα αυτά ως ηθικούς κινδύνους τόσο τρομερούς, ώστε καταλήγουν να οργανώνουν το μεγαλύτερο μέρος της κοινωνικής τους ζωής γύρω απ’ το να τα περιορίζουν» (59). Αυτή είναι μια αξιοσημείωτη πρόταση. Πρώτον, ορίζει με αποφασιστικότητα το ήθος και την ηθική ως τις καταστατικές βάσεις της ενσυνείδητης κοινωνικής οργάνωσης. Δεύτερον, αφήνει να εννοηθεί ότι οι κοινωνίες οργανώνονται με αυτόν τον τρόπο σε ολόκληρη την ανθρώπινη ιστορία, «σύγχρονη» ή «παλαιότερη».  

Στην πραγματικότητα, ο Graeber υποστηρίζει ότι «κάθε πραγματικά πολιτικά ενημερωμένη ανθρωπολογία θα πρέπει να αρχίσει να αντιμετωπίζει σοβαρά το ζήτημα του πώς, αν μη τι άλλο, χωρίζεται πραγματικά αυτό που μας αρέσει να αποκαλούμε ‘σύγχρονος’ κόσμος από το υπόλοιπο της ανθρώπινης ιστορίας» (73). Στα Αποσπάσματα, καθώς και στην Αυγή των Πάντων, ο Graeber απορρίπτει με πάθος τους μέχρι τώρα δεδομένους τρόπους οργάνωσης της ιστορίας σε περιόδους και εξελικτικά στάδια, έτσι ώστε ολόκληρη η ανθρώπινη ιστορία – μαζί με κάθε κοινωνία, λαό και πολιτισμό σε όλο το χρόνο και το χώρο – να κατοικείται από παραδείγματα ανθρώπινης δυνατότητας που θεσπίζονται από αποφασιστικά και ευφάνταστα, έξυπνα, παιχνιδιάρικα, πειραματικά, στοχαστικά, δημιουργικά και ενσυνείδητα πολιτικά πλάσματα.  

Για τον Graeber, η ανθρώπινη ιστορία δεν αποτελείται από μια σειρά από ‘επαναστάσεις’ (82) – είτε πρόκειται για τη Νεολιθική Επανάσταση, την Αγροτική Επανάσταση, τη Γαλλική Επανάσταση ή τη Βιομηχανική Επανάσταση – που εισάγουν σαφείς κοινωνικές, ηθικές ή πολιτικές ρήξεις στη φύση της κοινωνικής πραγματικότητας, ή, όπως προτιμά να τη σκέφτεται, στην «ανθρώπινη κατάσταση». Αν συμβαίνει αυτό, και αν ο αναρχισμός είναι κατά βάση μια ηθική της πρακτικής (143), όπως ισχυρίζεται, μια τέτοια ηθική γίνεται διαθέσιμη για ανθρωπολογική μελέτη και πολιτική έμπνευση σε ολόκληρη τη διάρκεια της ανθρώπινης ιστορίας.  

Είναι σημαντικό ωστόσο να σημειωθεί ότι ο Graeber διαφωνεί έντονα με τους πρωτογονιστές αναρχικούς που εμπνέονται από το σημαντικό δοκίμιο του ανθρωπολόγου μέντορά του Marshall Sahlins, The Original Affluent Society (Η Αυθεντική Κοινωνία της Αφθονίας) (1968), αναρχικούς που προτείνουν ότι «υπήρχε μια εποχή όπου η αλλοτρίωση και η ανισότητα δεν υπήρχαν, τότε που ο καθένας ήταν κυνηγος-τροφοσυλλέκτης αναρχικός, και ως εκ τούτου η πραγματική απελευθέρωση μπορεί να επέλθει μόνο αν εγκαταλείψουμε τον “πολιτισμό”» (93). Στα Αποσπάσματα, καθώς και στην Αυγή των Πάντων, αφηγείται μια πιο περίπλοκη ιστορία ατελείωτης ποικιλίας όπου, για παράδειγμα, «υπήρξαν κυνηγετικές-τροφοσυλλεκτικές κοινωνίες με ευγενείς και δούλους, (αλλά) υπήρχουν (και συνεχίζουν να υπάρχουν) αγροτικές κοινωνίες που είναι σε μεγάλο βαθμό εξισωτικές» (94).

Ο Graeber επιμένει, πρώτα στα Αποσπάσματα και στη συνέχεια ξανά στην Αυγή των Πάντων, ότι «οι άνθρωποι ποτέ δεν έζησαν πραγματικά στον κήπο της Εδέμ» (94). Η σημασία αυτού του ευρήματος είναι πολλαπλή. Μεταξύ άλλων, σημαίνει ότι μπορούμε να δούμε «την ιστορία ως μια πηγή με πολύ πιο ενδιαφέροντα για εμάς τρόπο» (94) και ότι «οι ριζοσπάστες θεωρητικοί δεν χρειάζεται να μελετούν συνέχεια πάνω στην ίδια ανεπάρκεια διακοσίων χρόνων επαναστατικής ιστορίας» (95).  

Γράφοντας στα Αποσπάσματα για την επανάσταση, ο Graeber απορρίπτει τον κοινότοπο ορισμό ο οποίος «πάντοτε υπονοούσε κάτι στη φύση της μεταβολής του παραδείγματος [paradigm]: μια καθαρή τομή, μια θεμελιώδης ρήξη στη φύση της κοινωνικής πραγματικότητας, ύστερα από την οποία όλα λειτουργούν διαφορετικά, και οι προηγούμενες κατηγορίες δεν ισχύουν πλέον» (79). Αντ’ αυτού, μας προτρέπει «να σταματήσουμε να σκεφτόμαστε την επανάσταση ως ένα πράγμα – ‘η’ επανάσταση, η μεγάλη κατακλυσμιαία ρήξη – και αντ’ αυτού να αναρωτηθούμε ‘τι είναι επαναστατική δράση;’» (83). Τονίζει ότι «επαναστατική δράση είναι κάθε συλλογική δράση που απορρίπτει, και γι’αυτό αντιμετωπίζει, κάποια μορφή εξουσίας ή κυριαρχίας και καθώς κάνει κάτι τέτοιο, επαναθεσμίζει τις κοινωνικές σχέσεις – ακόμη και μέσα στη συλλογικότητα – υπ’ αυτό το φως» (83), χωρίς απαραίτητα να στοχεύει στην ανατροπή μιας κυβέρνησης ή, επί τούτου, την ανατροπή του επικεφαλής ενός τμήματος ανθρωπολογίας.  

Αναφέρω αυτή τη δυνατότητα, στο ίδιο παιχνιδιάρικο πνεύμα με αυτό του Graeber, για να επιστρέψουμε στο εδώ και τώρα και στο τελευταίο τμήμα των Αποσπασμάτων με τίτλο «Ανθρωπολογία», στο οποίο ο Graeber «δαγκώνει κάπως διστακτικά το χέρι που τον ταΐζει» (143). Ο Graeber παρατηρεί πώς, αντί να υιοθετήσουν οποιοδήποτε είδος ριζοσπαστικής πολιτικής, οι ανθρωπολόγοι κινδυνεύουν να γίνουν «ένας ακόμα τροχός στην παγκόσμια άμαξα της ‘μηχανής της ταυτότητας’, έναν πλανητικό μηχανισμό θεσπίσεων και υποθέσεων», στον οποίο όλες οι διαμάχες σχετικά με τη φύση των πολιτικών ή οικονομικών πιθανοτήτων φαίνεται να έχουν τελειώσει και «ο μόνος τρόπος να κάνει κάποιος έναν πολιτικό ισχυρισμό είναι υποστηρίζοντας κάποια συλλογική ταυτότητα∙ με όλες τις υποθέσεις για το τι είναι ταυτότητα» (150). Και δηλώνει σαρκαστικά ότι, «η διαφορά στην οπτική γωνία του ανθρωπολόγου και του στελέχους του διεθνούς μάρκετινγκ μετά βίας διακρίνεται» (149). 

Αλλά τι προτείνει ο Graeber για την ανθρωπολογία; Παρατηρώντας ότι «οι ανθρωπολόγοι κάθονται, κυριολεκτικά, πάνω σ’ ένα αχανές αρχείο ανθρώπινης εμπειρίας, κοινωνικών και πολιτικών πειραμάτων για τα οποία κανείς άλλος δεν γνωρίζει πραγματικά τίποτα», λυπάται που το αρχείο αυτό της ανθρώπινης εμπειρίας αντιμετωπίζεται από τους ανθρωπολόγους ως «το μικρό βρώμικο μυστικό μας» (144). Φυσικά, ήταν η αποικιακή βία που κατέστησε δυνατό ένα τέτοιο αρχείο, όπως αναγνωρίζει ο Graeber χωρίς δισταγμό: «ο επιστημονικός κλάδος που γνωρίζουμε σήμερα έγινε εφικτός μέσω φρικιαστικών συνδυασμών κατάκτησης, αποικιοποίησης και μαζικών δολοφονιών – όπως συμβαίνει στους περισσότερους σύγχρονους ακαδημαϊκούς κλάδους» (144). Παρ ‘όλα αυτά, ο Graeber κάνει την τολμηρή πρόταση ότι «οι καρποί της εθνογραφίας – και οι τεχνικές της εθνογραφίας – μπορούν να βοηθήσουν εξαιρετικά» τα ριζοσπαστικά κινήματα σε όλο τον κόσμο, «αν οι ανθρωπολόγοι καταφέρουν να ξεπεράσουν τον – κατανοητό παρόλα αυτά – δισταγμό τους (το οφείλουν στη συχνά βρώμικη αποικιακή τους ιστορία) και να δουν σε τι θησαυρό πραγματικά κάθονται, όχι σαν κάποια μορφή ένοχου μυστικού (το οποίο είναι παρόλα αυτά το δικό τους ένοχο μυστικό και κανενός άλλου) αλλά ως την κοινή περιουσία της ανθρωπότητας» (142). Ξεπερνώντας αυτόν τον δισταγμό, πολλά χρόνια αργότερα, οι Graeber και Wengrow προσφέρουν για δια-επιστημονικό έλεγχο και έμπνευση ένα αχανές αρχείο ανθρώπινων δυνατοτήτων στο Η Αυγή Των Πάντων: Μια Καινούρια Ιστορία Της Ανθρωπότητας (2021). 

Ανθρωπότητα και Ελευθερία στην Αυγή των Πάντων 

Το βιβλίο Η Αυγή των Πάντων ξαναγράφει την ιστορία της ανθρωπότητας ως μια αλληλουχία τολμηρών κοινωνικών πειραμάτων που υλοποιούνται σε «ένα καρναβάλι πολιτικών μορφών» (Graeber and Wengrow, 2021). Καλύπτοντας χιλιάδες αιώνες σε όλο τον κόσμο σε περίπου εξακόσιες σελίδες, το βιβλίο αμφισβητεί γνωστές εξελικτικές θεωρίες της ανθρώπινης ιστορίας, οι οποίες υποθέτουν ότι οι ανθρώπινες κοινωνίες περιορίζονταν σε μικρές εξισωτικές ομάδες πριν από την εμφάνιση της γεωργοκτηνοτροφίας, ότι η γεωργία σήμανε την επινόηση της ιδιωτικής ιδιοκτησίας και σηματοδότησε ένα αμετάκλητο βήμα προς την ανισότητα, και ότι η εμφάνιση των πόλεων παγίωσε τις ταξικές διαφορές και οδήγησε στην ανάγκη για αυταρχικούς άρχοντες, πολεμιστές-πολιτικούς, και δεσποτικούς γραφειοκράτες (19)³. Σύμφωνα με τους Graeber και Wengrow, η ανθρώπινη ιστορία έχει μεγαλύτερη ποικιλία και είναι περισσότερο ενδιαφέρουσα και «ελπιδοφόρα» από ό,τι προτείνουν τέτοιες τελεολογικές αφηγήσεις (24). Ενώ για παράδειγμα υπήρχαν κοινωνίες τροφοσυλλεκτών κυνηγών με ευγενείς και σκλάβους, πολλές από τις πρώτες γεωργοκτηνοτροφικές κοινότητες ήταν σχετικά απαλλαγμένες από βαθμούς και ιεραρχίες και οι κάτοικοι των πρώτων πόλεων του κόσμου ήταν οργανωμένες σε στιβαρή εξισωτική βάση χωρίς να έχουν ανάγκη από αυταρχικούς άρχοντες και γραφειοκράτες (19). 

 «Σε αυτό το βιβλίο όχι μόνο θα παρουσιάσουμε μια νέα ιστορία της ανθρωπότητας, αλλά επίσης θα προσκαλέσουμε τον αναγνώστη σε μια νέα επιστήμη της ιστορίας, η οποία θα επαναφέρει τους προγόνους μας στην πλήρη ανθρώπινη φύση τους» (44), γράφουν οι Graeber και Wengrow. «Αυτό το βιβλίο προσπαθεί να θέσει τα θεμέλια», ισχυρίζονται, «για μια νέα παγκόσμια ιστορία» (45). Στην εκδοχή των συγγραφέων, η παγκόσμια ιστορία είναι μια θεατρική σκηνή πάνω στην οποία διάφορες κοινωνίες, λαοί και πολιτισμοί εμφανίζονται διαμέσου του χρόνου και του χώρου ως παραδείγματα ενσάρκωσης των «δυνατοτήτων που έχουμε» (40), ως αναμφισβήτητα ευφάνταστες, πειραματικές, δημιουργικές και πολιτικά αυτοσυνείδητες συλλογικότητες. Οι Graeber και Wengrow επιμένουν ότι οι ερωτήσεις που έχουμε συνηθίσει να θέτουμε σχετικά με την ουσία της ανθρωπότητας («ως είδος, είμαστε εκ φύσεως συνεργατικοί ή ανταγωνιστικοί, καλοσυνάτοι ή εγωιστές, καλοί ή κακοί;») μας τυφλώνουν «ως προς το τι πραγματικά μας καθιστά στην ουσία ανθρώπους, που είναι η ικανότητά μας – ως ηθικών και κοινωνικών όντων – να διαπραγματευόμαστε μεταξύ αυτών των εναλλακτικών» (159). Αντίστοιχα, οι συγγραφείς παρουσιάζουν στην Αυγή των Πάντων πολιτισμούς και κοινωνίες που έχουν να προσφέρουν αμέτρητα παραδείγματα τέτοιων «διαπραγματεύσεων» που συμβαίνουν από την Εποχή Των Παγετώνων.  

Οι Graeber και Wengrow δηλώνουν αποφασιστικά ότι Η Αυγή Των Πάντων είναι ένα βιβλίο που «αφορά κυρίως την ελευθερία» (267). «Αυτό που έχει εντέλει σημασία», γράφουν κατά την εισαγωγή αυτού του συναρπαστικού βιβλίου, «είναι αν μπορούμε να ανακαλύψουμε εκ νέου τις ελευθερίες που μας κάνουν πρωτίστως ανθρώπους» (25). Ποιες είναι αυτές οι ελευθερίες που μας κάνουν πρωτίστως ανθρώπους; Μήπως δεν είμαστε πλέον «πλήρως ανθρώπινοι» αν αυτές οι ελευθερίες έχουν πια χαθεί – ακόμη και από τη φαντασία μας – όπως επανειλημμένα θρηνούν οι συγγραφείς; Οι Graeber και Wengrow ορίζουν τρεις ελευθερίες που «φαίνεται πως θεωρούνταν δεδομένες μεταξύ των μακρινών προγόνων μας, έστω και αν οι περισσότεροι σήμερα μόλις που τις διανοούνται» (177). Αυτές οι τρεις ελευθερίες είναι «η ελευθερία να εγκαταλείψει κάποιος την κοινότητά του, ξέροντας ότι θα είναι ευπρόσδεκτος σε μακρινές χώρες· η ελευθερία να πηγαίνει από τη μια κοινωνικά δομή στην άλλη, ανάλογα με την εποχή του χρόνου· [και] η ελευθερία να απειθαρχεί στην εξουσία χωρίς συνέπειες» (177). Εάν συμβαίνει αυτό, εμφανίζεται αμέσως ένα αμείλικτο ερώτημα: πώς μπορούμε να γνωρίζουμε ποιες ελευθερίες οι πρόγονοί μας θεωρούσαν δεδομένες; Θέτοντας αυτό το ερώτημα, δεν υπαινίσσομαι ότι «οι πρόγονοί μας» μας είναι ουσιαστικά άγνωστοι επειδή είναι πολύ διαφορετικοί (οντολογικά διαφορετικοί, θα μπορούσε κανείς να πει), αλλά ότι ακόμη και αν η αρχαιολογία και η ανθρωπολογία, και οι ανθρωπιστικές και κοινωνικές επιστήμες ευρύτερα, μπορεί να έχουν ως σκοπό τους «το να αναδιαμορφώσουμε τις απόψεις μας για το τι είμαστε και τι μπορούμε να γίνουμε» (659), παραμένει ασαφές εάν έχουν την ικανότητα να το κάνουν αυτό χωρίς να αναπτύξουν κάποιο είδος «μύθου» – συμπεριλαμβανομένων νέων μύθων σχετικά με το «τι σημαίνει πραγματικά να είσαι sapiens (έμφρων)» (159). Παρ’ όλα αυτά, στο βαθμό που οι μύθοι είναι απαραίτητοι για να δώσουν στην ανθρώπινη ζωή ένα κοινό – δηλαδή κοινωνικό – νόημα, οι Graeber και Wengrow αναφερόμενοι σε νέα αρχαιολογικά και ανθρωπολογικά ευρήματα επινοούν μύθους που μπορεί να αποδειχθούν πιο εμπνευσμένοι στο να γίνουν «πιστευτοί», σε αντίθεση με τις τελεολογικές θεωρίες της κοινωνικής εξέλιξης που επικυρώνουν τις τρέχουσες κοινωνικές και πολιτικές ρυθμίσεις ως αδιάψευστη «πρόοδο». Εξάλλου, η «ανθρωπότητα» η ίδια ως ένα φαινομενικά ξεχωριστό είδος, ως ιδανικό, ως κοινότητα, ως πρωταγωνιστής, μπορεί να απαιτεί έναν νέο μύθο, μια «νέα επιστήμη της ιστορίας» για να φέρει όλα τα μέλη της κοντά και να τα ενώσει. Με την Αυγή των Πάντων, ο Graeber και ο Wengrow πρωτίστως καλούν την ανθρωπότητα να υπάρξει γράφοντας η ίδια την ιστορία της, εξερευνώντας το πιθανό παρελθόν και μέλλον της, καθιστώντας «την» ένα επιστημονικό αλλά και όχι λιγότερο μεταφυσικό γεγονός.  

Όταν διατυπώνουν τις τρεις ελευθερίες της ανθρωπότητας, οι Graeber και Wengrow τις τοποθετούν ως «βασικές αρχές» (362): «Μιλήσαμε ήδη για τις θεμελιώδεις, ακόμη και πρωταρχικές, μορφές ελευθερίας», γράφουν, «την ελευθερία της μετακίνησης· την ελευθερία ανυπακοής σε διαταγές· την ελευθερία επαναοργάνωσης των κοινωνικών σχέσεων» (460). Εδώ, εμφανίζεται ένα άλλο ερώτημα: Με ποια έννοια είναι αυτές οι μορφές ελευθερίας «θεμελιώδεις» και «πρωταρχικές» – είναι μήπως ιστορικά γεγονότα ή είναι ηθικές και πολιτικές συνταγές σχετικά με τις μορφές ελευθερίας που θα πρέπει να συνεπάγεται η ανθρώπινη ύπαρξη, συμπεριλαμβανομένου αυτού που οι συγγραφείς αποκαλούν «το βασικότερο στοιχείο όλων των ανθρώπινων ελευθεριών, η ελευθερία να δίνουμε υποσχέσεις και να αναλαμβάνουμε δεσμεύσεις, άρα να χτίζουμε σχέσεις» (539); Μου φαίνεται ότι οι τρεις ελευθερίες της ανθρωπότητας δεν είναι ούτε αδιαμφισβήτητα γεγονότα που έρχονται από το παρελθόν, ούτε πολιτικές συνταγές για το μέλλον, αλλά κάτι πιο ελπιδοφόρο: είναι δυνατότητες που μπορούμε συλλογικά να υλοποιήσουμε. Οι Graeber και Wengrow θέτουν την εξής ρητορική ερώτηση «μήπως η ίδια η ικανότητα να πειραματιζόμαστε με διαφορετικές μορφές κοινωνικής οργάνωσης δεν είναι αναπόσπαστο τμήμα αυτού που μας κάνει ανθρώπους; Δηλαδή, όντα με την ικανότητα της αυτοδημιουργίας, ακόμα και της ελευθερίας;» (24). Προσέξτε πώς, σε τέτοιες διατυπώσεις, αυτό που μοιράζονται όλοι οι άνθρωποι στο χρόνο και το χώρο είναι η ικανότητα να πειραματίζονται με διαφορετικές μορφές κοινωνικής οργάνωσης – δηλαδή, η ανθρωπότητα έχει τη δυνατότητα για αυτοδημιουργία και ελευθερία, αλλά όχι απαραίτητα και για την ίδια την ελευθερία. Το τελευταίο απαιτεί περισσότερη φαντασία από ό,τι οι περισσότεροι σύγχρονοι άνθρωποι μπορούν να διαθέσουν μέσα στα «εννοιολογικά δεσμά» τους (9).  

Οι Graeber και Wengrow ισχυρίζονται ότι «τα ανθρώπινα όντα [είναι] θεμελιωδώς ευφάνταστα πλάσματα», στη ρίζα των οποίων βρίσκεται η τάση μας για υπερβολή. «Ένα από τα πράγματα που μας ξεχωρίζουν από τα ζώα είναι ότι τα ζώα παράγουν ακριβώς και μόνο ό,τι χρειάζονται· οι άνθρωποι απαρέγκλιτα παράγουν περισσότερα. Είμαστε πλάσματα της υπερβολής, και αυτό που μας κάνει ταυτόχρονα το πιο δημιουργικό, και το πιο καταστροφικό από όλα τα είδη» (171), γράφουν. Αυτό το συλλογικά δημιουργούμενο πλεόνασμα, παρατηρούν οι συγγραφείς, θέτει «θεμελιώδη ερωτήματα για το τι σημαίνει να είσαι άνθρωπος» (171), ακόμη και όταν οι άρχουσες τάξεις προσπαθούν αδιάκοπα να κλείσουν αυτό το ζήτημα και να οργανώσουν την κοινωνία «με τέτοιο τρόπο ώστε να μπορούν να αποσπούν για τον εαυτό τους τη μερίδα του λέοντος από αυτό το πλεόνασμα, είτε με φόρους υποτέλειας, δουλεία, φεουδαρχικούς δασμούς είτε με τη χειραγώγηση των διευθετήσεων της κατ’ επίφαση ελεύθερης αγοράς» (171). Αλλά δεν υπάρχει σε όλα αυτά τίποτα το αναπόφευκτο. Οι Graeber και Wengrow προσφέρουν στην Αυγή των Πάντων ένα πλήθος παραδειγμάτων που επιδεικνύουν εναλλακτικές κοινωνικές διευθετήσεις σε όλη την ανθρώπινη ιστορία, κοινωνικές διευθετήσεις που δίνουν προτεραιότητα στην αλληλοβοήθεια και τη συλλογική φροντίδα. Στην πραγματικότητα, οι συγγραφείς τολμούν να θέσουν ως πιθανότητα πως μπορεί «η αλληλοβοήθεια, η κοινωνική συνεργασία, ο ακτιβισμός, η φιλοξενία ή απλώς η έγνοια για τους άλλους να είναι τα πράγματα που αποτελούν τους πολιτισμούς» (546).⁴

Σύμφωνα με τους Graeber και Wengrow, πρόκειται για ένα είδος κομουνισμού που γίνεται κατανοητός «ως προσδοκία κοινοχρησίας, ότι οι άνθρωποι που δεν είναι πραγματικά εχθροί αναμένεται να ανταποκριθούν ο ένας στις ανάγκες του άλλου» (96) – ένας κομουνισμός επί της αρχής, «από τον καθένα σύμφωνα με τις ικανότητές του, στον καθένα σύμφωνα με τις ανάγκες του» – που αποτελεί το θεμέλιο της ανθρώπινης κοινωνικότητας (72). Ενώ αυτό που αντιλαμβάνονται οι Graeber και Wengrow ως «βασικό κομουνισμό»⁵ είναι ένα καθολικό χαρακτηριστικό όλων των ανθρώπινων κοινωνιών μέσα σε όλη την ιστορία, «αυτό που ποικίλλει είναι μέχρι ποιο σημείο πιστεύεται ότι θα έπρεπε να επεκταθεί αυτός ο βασικός κομουνισμός» (72). Ενώ η ευρωπαϊκή αντίληψη της ατομικής ελευθερίας καταλήγει να «είναι άρρηκτα συνδεδεμένη με τις ιδέες της ιδιωτικής ιδιοκτησίας», η κριτική των ευρωπαϊκών κοινωνιών που αναπτύχθηκε από τους αυτόχθονες Αμερικανούς διανοούμενους όπως ο Καντιαρόνκ κατά την αποικιακή συνάντηση καταδεικνύει το πώς η άσκηση της ελευθερίας του ατόμου προϋπέθετε ένα συγκεκριμένο επίπεδο βασικού κομουνισμού (96).  

Ιστορικά, παρατηρούν οι συγγραφείς, η κατανόηση ότι οι αυτόχθονες Αμερικανοί ζούσαν σε «κοινωνίες εν γένει ελεύθερες, και οι Ευρωπαίοι όχι, ποτέ δεν ήταν θέμα αντιπαράθεσης» στις επαφές μεταξύ εποίκων στη Βόρεια Αμερική, αυτόχθονων διανοουμένων και, έμμεσα, στοχαστών του Διαφωτισμού όπως ο Ρουσσώ (63). Είναι εντυπωσιακό ότι οι Graeber και Wengrow υποστηρίζουν περαιτέρω ότι «υπάρχει λόγος που τόσοι εξέχοντες στοχαστές του Διαφωτισμού επέμεναν ότι τα ιδανικά τους περί ατομικής ελευθερίας και πολιτικής ισότητας ήταν εμπνευσμένα από πηγές και παραδείγματα ιθαγενών Αμερικανών. Επειδή αυτό ήταν αλήθεια» (59). Φυσικά, αυτοί οι στοχαστές του Διαφωτισμού και κυρίως ο Ρουσσώ, υιοθέτησαν μια διαφορετική φιλοσοφική ανθρωπολογία από αυτή που αναπτύσσουν οι Graeber και Wengrow στην Αυγή των Πάντων. Ο Ρουσσώ εφηύρε μια καθαρά φανταστική εποχή της Φυσική Κατάστασης, με τους ελεύθερους και αθώους «αγρίους» της – «στην οποία κάθε άτομο περιπλανιόταν μονάχο μέσα στα δέντρα» έως ότου η γη χωρίστηκε σε ιδιωτικά οικόπεδα, τα οποία στη συνέχεια μας έδωσαν, έτσι λέει η αφήγηση, τους νόμους μας που ρυθμίζουν την ιδιωτική ιδιοκτησία και το ίδιο το κράτος (97). 

Για τους Graeber και Wengrow, ωστόσο, το πραγματικό «τοξικό στοιχείο» στη σκέψη του Ρουσσώ ήταν η προώθηση του «μύθου του ανόητου αγρίου – έστω και αν τον θεωρούσε ευτυχισμένο μέσα στην ανοησία του» (104). Είναι αυτός ο μύθος που δημιούργησε τον εννοιολογικό χώρο (που αγκαλιάστηκε από φωνές που προπαγάνδιζαν τον ιμπεριαλισμό του δέκατου ένατου αιώνα, τον δαρβινικό εξελικτισμό και τον «επιστημονικό» ρατσισμό), όπου οι κρίσεις των αυτόχθονων λαών δεν φαίνονταν πια απειλητικές (104). Στην πραγματικότητα και ενάντια στο ρεύμα της ιστορία της ευρωπαϊκής διανόησης, οι Graeber και Wengrow προτείνουν ότι «οι θεωρίες της κοινωνικής εξέλιξης – πλέον τόσο γνώριμες ώστε σπανίως αναρωτιόμαστε για την προέλευσή τους – πρωτοδιατυπώθηκαν στην Ευρώπη ως άμεση απάντηση στη δύναμη της κριτικής των αυτοχθόνων» (89), μια διαπεραστική κριτική που τόνισε την έλλειψη ελευθερίας και αλληλοβοήθειας στις ευρωπαϊκές κοινωνίες.  

Παρ’ όλα αυτά, οι Graeber και Wengrow επιμένουν ότι «ο Ρουσσώ δεν έκανε εντελώς λάθος», καθώς «κάτι έχει όντως χαθεί». Καταλήγοντας, λοιπόν, οι συγγραφείς διατυπώνουν τι συνεπάγεται αυτή η απώλεια: «Είναι σαφές ότι εδώ πράγματι έχει αλλάξει κάτι σχετικό με τις ανθρώπινες κοινωνίες, και με πολύ βαθύ τρόπο. Οι τρεις βασικές ελευθερίες σταδιακά υποχώρησαν, σε σημείο που η πλειονότητα των ανθρώπων σήμερα μετά βίας αντιλαμβάνεται πώς θα ήταν να ζουν σε μια κοινωνική τάξη που θα βασιζόταν σε αυτούς» (632). Και πώς συνέβη αυτό, ρωτούν επανειλημμένα οι συγγραφείς, πώς «οι άνθρωποι καταλήξαμε να χάσουμε σε μεγάλο βαθμό την ευελιξία και την ελευθερία που κάποτε φαίνεται ότι χαρακτήριζαν τις κοινωνικές διευθετήσεις μας, και βρεθήκαμε κολλημένοι σε μόνιμες σχέσεις κυριαρχίας και υποταγής»; (186) Οι απαντήσεις τους είναι ταυτόχρονα υποθετικές και προκλητικές, ιδίως όταν διερευνούν «τη σύγκλιση μεταξύ συστημάτων βίας και συστημάτων φροντίδας» (650) ως την κρίσιμη, ακόμη και αιτιατή εξήγηση αυτής της απώλειας. Οι Graeber και Wengrow προτείνουν ότι το πράγμα «ίσως ξεκίνησε να στραβώνει ακριβώς όταν οι άνθρωποι άρχισαν να χάνουν την ελευθερία να φαντάζονται και να υλοποιούν άλλες μορφές κοινωνικής ύπαρξης» (630). Αν είναι ορισμένες ελευθερίες που μας κάνουν ανθρώπους εξαρχής, τι λέει για αυτές τις ελευθερίες το γεγονός ότι χρειάζονται «να ανακαλυφθούν εκ νέου», και τι λέει αυτό για εμάς τους σύγχρονους ανθρώπους; Μήπως δεν είμαστε πλέον «πλήρως ανθρώπινοι» αν αυτές οι ελευθερίες σήμερα χάνονται, όπως επανειλημμένα δηλώνουν οι συγγραφείς; Με την Αυγή Των Πάντων, οι David Graeber και ο David Wengrow δημιουργούν ένα θεαματικό πλαίσιο για να σκεφτούμε τις ανθρώπινες δυνατότητες και να δράσουμε στις «πρωταρχικές» ελευθερίες μας για μετακίνηση, για απείθεια και για αναδιάταξη των κοινωνικών σχέσεων στο σήμερα. 

Επιστρέφοντας από εκεί που ξεκίνησα, θα ήθελα να υποστηρίξω ότι ο αναρχισμός και η ανθρωπολογική γνώση της αναρχικής ηθικής και των αναρχικών πρακτικών και φαντασιακών σε όλη την ανθρώπινη ιστορία αποτελούν μέρος της «κοινής περιουσίας της ανθρωπότητας» (Graeber 2004: 142), η οποία περιλαμβάνει τώρα τις συνεισφορές του ίδιου του Graeber στην αναρχική θεωρία και πρακτική μαζί με την εκπληκτική φαντασία του για το πιθανό παρελθόν και μέλλον τους. Επιτρέψτε μου να ολοκληρώσω με ένα εντυπωσιακά ευφάνταστο κομμάτι από τα Αποσπάσματα, το οποίο θα μπορούσαμε να λάβουμε ως κάλεσμα να σκεφτούμε και να δράσουμε προς την κατεύθυνση της δυνατότητας ενός αναρχικού μέλλοντος: 

…οι αναρχικές μορφές οργάνωσης δεν θα μοιάζουν καθόλου με το κράτος. …θα αφορούν μια ατελείωτη ποικιλία κοινοτήτων, οργανώσεων, δικτύων, εγχειρημάτων, σε κάθε νοητή κλίμακα, που θα συμπλέκονται και θα τέμνονται με κάθε τρόπο που θα μπορούσαμε να φανταστούμε, και πιθανόν με πολλούς που δεν μπορούμε. Κάποιες μορφές θα είναι αρκετά τοπικές, άλλες παγκόσμιες. Ίσως το μόνο που θα είχαν κοινό είναι ότι σε καμιά από αυτές δεν θα μπορούσε να εμφανιστεί κάποιος με όπλα και να πει σε όλους τους άλλους να το βουλώσουν και να κάνουν ό,τι τους λέει. Και από τη στιγμή που οι αναρχικοί δεν προσπαθούν στην πραγματικότητα να καταλάβουν την εξουσία μέσα στα πλαίσια οποιουδήποτε εθνικού εδάφους, η διαδικασία κατά την οποία ένα σύστημα αντικαθιστά το άλλο δεν θα πάρει τη μορφή κάποιου ξαφνικού επαναστατικού κατακλυσμού – την έφοδο σε μια Βαστίλη, ή την κατάληψη κάποιου Χειμερινού Ανακτόρου – θα είναι απαραίτητα σταδιακή∙ η δημιουργία εναλλακτικών μορφών οργάνωσης σε παγκόσμια κλίμακα, νέων μορφών επικοινωνίας, νέων, λιγότερο αλλοτριωμένων, τρόπων οργάνωσης της ζωής, που θα κάνουν τις σύγχρονες μορφές της εξουσίας να δείχνουν, τελικά, ηλίθιες και ασήμαντες. Αυτό με τη σειρά του σημαίνει ότι υπάρχουν ατελείωτα παραδείγματα βιώσιμου αναρχισμού: σχεδόν κάθε μορφή οργάνωσης θα μετρούσε ως ένα τέτοιο παράδειγμα, από τη στιγμή που δεν θα επιβαλλόταν από κάποια υψηλότερη εξουσία. 

(Graeber 2004: 77) 

Στο Αποσπάσματα Μιας Αναρχικής Ανθρωπολογίας, γράφοντας για τη Μαδαγασκάρη, ο Graeber γράφει: «φαίνεται συχνά πως κανείς δεν αναλαμβάνει πλήρως την εξουσία μέχρις αφότου έχει πεθάνει» (Graeber 2004: 101). Κατά τη γνώμη μου, πρέπει τώρα να αντιμετωπίσουμε την «πλήρη αυθεντία»⁶ του Graeber με ένα αναρχικό πνεύμα. Το έργο που έχουμε μπροστά μας δεν μπορεί να είναι η απολίθωση μέσω της ειδωλοποίησης ή της αγιοποίησης, αλλά η προέκταση μιας πρόσκλησης για να σκεφτούμε, να παίξουμε και να πειραματιστούμε με τις συνεισφορές του στην Ανθρωπολογία και τον Αναρχισμό.  

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ΒΙΒΛΙΟΓΡΑΦΙΑ  

David Graeber(2004) Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.  

• Αποσπάσματα μιας Αναρχικής Ανθρωπολογίας. Στάσει Εκπίπτοντες, 2019

David Graeber(2007) Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion and Desire. California: AK Press.  

• Στις Απαρχές Του Σύγχρονου Αδιεξόδου – Σκέψεις Για Την Ιεραρχία, Την Κατανάλωση, Τον Φετιχισμό, Την Αξία, Τους Τρόπους Παραγωγής. Στάσει Εκπίπτοντες, 2019
• Στο Λυκόφως Των Πρωτοποριών – Η Ανάδυση Των Σύγχρονων Κοινωνικών Κινημάτων. Στάσει Εκπίπτοντες, 2012

David Graeber(2009) Direct Action: An Ethnography. California: AK Press. 

David Graeber(2011) Debt: The First 5,000 Years. New York:Melville House Publishing. 

• Χρέος (Τα πρώτα 5.000 χρόνια). Στάσει Εκπίπτοντες, 2013

David Graeber(2013) The Democracy Project: A History. A Crisis. A Movement. New York: Spiegel & Grau, a publishing imprint of Penguin Random House. 

David Graeber(2020) Anarchy—In a Manner of Speaking. Zurich-Paris-Berlin: Diaphanes.  

David Graeberand David Wengrow (2021) The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. London: Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books. 

• Η Αυγή Των Πάντων – Μια Καινούρια Ιστορία της Ανθρωπότητας. Διόπτρα, 2023

Marshall Sahlins (1968) “Notes on the Original Affluent Society.” In Man the Hunter: The First Intensive Survey of a Single, Crucial Stage of Human Development—Man’s Once Universal Hunting Way of Life, Lee and DeVore (eds), pp. 85-9. Chicago: Aldine. 

David Wengrow (2018) “A history of true civilisation is not one of monuments,” in Aeon. https://aeon.co/ideas/a-history-of-true-civilisation-is-not-one-of-monuments 

Πηγή: https://www.academia.edu/

Η Ayça Çubukçu είναι Αναπληρώτρια Καθηγήτρια Ανθρωπίνων Δικαιωμάτων και Συνδιευθύντρια του Τμήματος Ανθρώπινων Δικαιωμάτων στη Σχολή Οικονομικών και Πολιτικών Επιστημών του Λονδίνου (London School of Economics and Political Science).

ΜΕΤΑΦΡΑΣΗ: Νίκος Γκατζίκης

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ΔΙΑΒΑΣΤΕ ΕΠΙΣΗΣ:

1. ΣτΜ: Εδώ η Çubukçu χρησιμοποιεί τον όρο «extractive history» θέλοντας να τονίσει την αποικιοκρατική ιδεολογία και σκέψη που κυριαρχεί στους ακαδημαϊκούς και πανεπιστημιακούς κύκλους και μεθόδους μάθησης και εκπαίδευσης.  ︎
2. ΣτΜ: οι αριθμοί των σελίδων σε αυτό το κεφάλαιο αναφέρονται στην ελληνική έκδοση των Αποσπασμάτων ︎
3. ΣτΜ: οι αριθμοί των σελίδων σε αυτό το κεφάλαιο αναφέρονται στην ελληνική έκδοση της Αυγής Των Πάντων ︎
4. Ο David Wengrow αναπτύσσει αυτό το επιχείρημα στο David Wengrow (2018), «Μια ιστορία αληθινού πολιτισμού δεν είναι μια ιστορία των μνημείων», στο Aeon.  https://aeon.co/ideas/a-history-of-true-civilisation-is-not-one-of-monuments. Τον ευχαριστώ που μου έδειξε αυτό το δοκίμιο. ︎
5. Ο David Graeber αναπτύσσει την ιδέα του «βασικού κομουνισμού» στο έργο του Χρέος: Τα πρώτα 5.000 χρόνια (2011). ︎
6. ΣτΜ: στο πρωτότυπο “full authority” ︎

The post David Graeber / Η Ανθρωπολογία Των Ανθρώπινων Δυνατοτήτων- της δρ. Ayça Çubukçu (LSE) appeared first on Void Network.

Let’s take just one example. Back in the 1980s, there was a great deal of buzz about a “mitochondrial Eve”, the putative common ancestor of our entire species. Granted, no one was claiming to have actually found the physical remains of such an ancestor, but DNA sequencing demonstrated that such an Eve must have existed, perhaps as recently as 120,000 years ago. And while no one imagined we’d ever find Eve herself, the discovery of a variety of other fossil skulls rescued from the Great Rift Valley in east Africa seemed to provide a suggestion as to what Eve might have looked like and where she might have lived. While scientists continued debating the ins and outs, popular magazines were soon carrying stories about a modern counterpart to the Garden of Eden, the original incubator of humanity, the savanna-womb that gave life to us all.

Many of us probably still have something resembling this picture of human origins in our mind. More recent research, though, has shown it couldn’t possibly be accurate. In fact, biological anthropologists and geneticists are now converging on an entirely different picture. For most of our evolutionary history, we did indeed live in Africa – but not just the eastern savannas, as previously thought. Instead, our biological ancestors were distributed everywhere from Morocco to the Cape of Good Hope. Some of those populations remained isolated from one another for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years, cut off from their nearest relatives by deserts and rainforests. Strong regional traits developed, so that early human populations appear to have been far more physically diverse than modern humans. If we could travel back in time, this remote past would probably strike us as something more akin to a world inhabited by hobbits, giants and elves than anything we have direct experience of today, or in the more recent past.

Ancestral humans were not only quite different from one another; they also coexisted with smaller-brained, more ape-like species such as Homo naledi. What were these ancestral societies like? At this point, at least, we should be honest and admit that, for the most part, we don’t have the slightest idea. There’s only so much you can reconstruct from cranial remains and the occasional piece of knapped flint – which is basically all we have.

What we do know is that we are composite products of this original mosaic of human populations, which interacted with one another, interbred, drifted apart and came together mostly in ways we can only still guess at. It seems reasonable to assume that behaviours like mating and child-rearing practices, the presence or absence of dominance hierarchies or forms of language and proto-language must have varied at least as much as physical types, and probably far more.

Perhaps the only thing we can say with real certainty is that modern humans first appeared in Africa. When they began expanding out of Africa into Eurasia, they encountered other populations such as Neanderthals and Denisovans – less different, but still different – and these various groups interbred. Only after those other populations became extinct can we really begin talking about a single, human “us” inhabiting the planet. What all this brings home is just how radically different the social and physical world of our remote ancestors would have seemed to us – and this would have been true at least down to about 40,000BC. In other words, there is no “original” form of human society. Searching for one can only be a matter of myth-making.

Over recent decades, archeological evidence has emerged that seems to completely defy our image of what scholars call the Upper Palaeolithic period (roughly 50,000–15,000BC). For a long time, it had been assumed that this was a world made up of tiny egalitarian forager bands. But the discovery of evidence of “princely” burials and grand communal buildings has undermined that image.

Rich hunter-gatherer burials have been found across much of western Eurasia, from the Dordogne to the Don. They include discoveries in rock shelters and open-air settlements. Some of the earliest come from sites like Sunghir in northern Russia and Dolní Věstonice in the Moravian basin, and date from between 34,000 and 26,000 years ago.

What we find here are not cemeteries but isolated burials of individuals or small groups, their bodies often placed in striking postures and decorated – in some cases, almost saturated – with ornaments. In the case of Sunghir that meant many thousands of beads, laboriously worked from mammoth ivory and fox teeth. Some of the most lavish costumes are from the conjoined burials of two boys, flanked by great lances made from straightened mammoth tusks.

Of similar antiquity is a group of cave burials unearthed on the coast of Liguria, near the border between Italy and France. Complete bodies of young or adult men, including one especially lavish interment known to archaeologists as Il Principe (“the Prince”), were laid out in striking poses and suffused with jewellery. Il Principebears that name because he’s also buried with what looks to the modern eye like regalia: a flint sceptre, elk antler batons and an ornate headdress lovingly fashioned from perforated shells and deer teeth.

Another unexpected result of recent archaeological research, causing many to revise their view of prehistoric hunter-gatherers, is the appearance of monumental architecture. In Eurasia, the most famous examples are the stone temples of the Germus mountains, overlooking the Harran plain in south-east Turkey. In the 1990s, German archaeologists, working on the plain’s northern frontier, began uncovering extremely ancient remains at a place known locally as Göbekli Tepe. What they found has since come to be regarded as an evolutionary conundrum. The main source of puzzlement is a group of 20 megalithic enclosures, initially raised there around 9000BC, and then repeatedly modified over many centuries.

The enclosures at Göbekli Tepe are massive. They comprise great T-shaped pillars, some over 5 metres high and weighing up to 8 tonnes, which were hewn from the site’s limestone bedrock or nearby quarries. The pillars, at least 200 in total, were raised into sockets and linked by walls of rough stone. Each is a unique work of sculpture, carved with images from the world of dangerous carnivores and poisonous reptiles, as well as game species, waterfowl and small scavengers. Animal forms project from the rock in varying depths of relief: some hover coyly on the surface, others emerge boldly into three dimensions. These often nightmarish creatures follow divergent orientations, some marching to the horizon, others working their way down into the earth. In places, the pillar itself becomes a sort of standing body, with human-like limbs and clothing.

The creation of these remarkable buildings implies strictly coordinated activity on a really large scale. Who made them? While groups of humans not too far away had already begun cultivating crops at the time, to the best of our knowledge those who built Göbekli Tepe had not. Yes, they harvested and processed wild cereals and other plants in season, but there is no compelling reason to see them as “proto-farmers”, or to suggest they had any interest in orienting their livelihoods around the domestication of crops. Indeed, there was no particular reason why they should, given the availability of fruits, berries, nuts and edible wild fauna in their vicinity.

And while Göbekli Tepe has often been presented as an anomaly, there is in fact a great deal of evidence for monumental construction of different sorts among hunter-gatherers in earlier periods, extending back into the ice age.

In Europe, between 25,000 and 12,000 years ago, public works were already a feature of human habitation across an area reaching from Kraków to Kyiv. Research at the Russian site of Yudinovo suggests that “mammoth houses”, as they are often called, were not in fact dwellings at all, but monuments in the strict sense: carefully planned and constructed to commemorate the completion of a great mammoth hunt, using whatever durable parts remained once carcasses had been processed for their meat and hides. We are talking here about really staggering quantities of meat: for each structure (there were five at Yudinovo), there was enough mammoth to feed hundreds of people for around three months. Open-air settlements like Yudinovo, Mezhirich and Kostenki, where such mammoth monuments were erected, often became central places whose inhabitants exchanged amber, marine shells and animal pelts over impressive distances.

So what are we to make of all this evidence for princely burials, stone temples, mammoth monuments and bustling centres of trade and craft production, stretching back far into the ice age? What are they doing there, in a Palaeolithic world where – at least on some accounts – nothing much is ever supposed to have happened, and human societies can best be understood by analogy with troops of chimps or bonobos? Unsurprisingly, perhaps, some have responded by completely abandoning the idea of an egalitarian golden age, concluding instead that this must have been a society dominated by powerful leaders, even dynasties – and, therefore, that self-aggrandisement and coercive power have always been the enduring forces behind human social evolution. But this doesn’t really work either.

Evidence of institutional inequality in ice age societies, whether grand burials or monumental buildings, is sporadic. Richly costumed burials appear centuries, and often hundreds of miles, apart. Even if we put this down to the patchiness of the evidence, we still have to ask why the evidence is so patchy in the first place. After all, if any of these ice age “princes” had behaved like, say, bronze age (let alone Renaissance Italian) princes, we’d also be finding all the usual trappings of centralised power: fortifications, storehouses, palaces. Instead, over tens of thousands of years, we see monuments and magnificent burials, but little else to indicate the growth of ranked societies, let alone anything remotely resembling “states”.

To understand why the early record of human social life is patterned in this strange, staccato fashion we first have to do away with some lingering preconceptions about “primitive” mentalities.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many in Europe and North America believed that “primitive” folk were not only incapable of political self-consciousness, they were not even capable of fully conscious thought on the individual level – or at least conscious thought worthy of the name. They argued that anyone classified as a “primitive” or “savage” operated with a “pre-logical mentality”, or lived in a mythological dreamworld. At best, they were mindless conformists, bound in the shackles of tradition; at worst, they were incapable of fully conscious, critical thought of any kind.

Nowadays, no reputable scholar would make such claims: everyone at least pays lip service to the psychic unity of mankind. But in practice, little has changed. Scholars still write as if those living in earlier stages of economic development, and especially those who are classified as “egalitarian”, can be treated as if they were literally all the same, living in some collective group-think: if human differences show up in any form – different “bands” being different from one another – it is only in the same way that bands of great apes might differ. Political self-consciousness among such people is seen as impossible.

And if certain hunter-gatherers turn out not to have been living perpetually in “bands” at all, but instead congregating to create grand landscape monuments, storing large quantities of preserved food and treating particular individuals like royalty, contemporary scholars are at best likely to place them in a new stage of development: they have moved up the scale from “simple” to “complex” hunter-gatherers, a step closer to agriculture and urban civilisation. But they are still caught in the same evolutionary straitjacket, their place in history defined by their mode of subsistence, and their role blindly to enact some abstract law of development which we understand but they do not. Certainly, it rarely occurs to anyone to ask what sort of worlds they thought they were trying to create.

Now, admittedly, this isn’t true of all scholars. Anthropologists who spend years talking to indigenous people in their own languages, and watching them argue with one another, tend to be well aware that even those who make their living hunting elephants or gathering lotus buds are just as sceptical, imaginative, thoughtful and capable of critical analysis as those who make their living by operating tractors, managing restaurants or chairing university departments.

One of the few mid-20th-century anthropologists to take seriously the idea that early humans were our intellectual equals was Claude Lévi-Strauss, who argued that mythological thought, rather than representing some sort of pre-logical haze, is better conceived as a kind of “neolithic science” as sophisticated as our own, just built on different principles. Less well known – but more relevant to the problems we are grappling with here – are some of his early writings on politics.

In 1944, Lévi-Strauss published an essay about politics among the Nambikwara, a small population of part-time farmers, part-time foragers inhabiting a notoriously inhospitable stretch of savanna in north-west Mato Grosso, Brazil. The Nambikwara then had a reputation as extremely simple folk, given their very rudimentary material culture. For this reason, many treated them almost as a direct window on to the Palaeolithic. This, Lévi-Strauss pointed out, was a mistake. People like the Nambikwara live in the shadow of the modern state, trading with farmers and city people and sometimes hiring themselves out as labourers. Some might even be descendants of runaways from cities or plantations.

For Lévi-Strauss, what was especially instructive about the Nambikwara was that, for all that they were averse to competition, they did appoint chiefs to lead them. The very simplicity of the resulting arrangement, he felt, might expose “some basic functions” of political life that “remain hidden in more complex and elaborate systems of government”. Not only was the role of the chief socially and psychologically quite similar to that of a national politician or statesman in European society, he noted, it also attracted similar personality types: people who “unlike most of their companions, enjoy prestige for its own sake, feel a strong appeal to responsibility, and to whom the burden of public affairs brings its own reward”.

Modern politicians play the role of wheelers and dealers, brokering alliances or negotiating compromises between different constituencies or interest groups. In Nambikwara society this didn’t happen much, because there weren’t really many differences in wealth or status. However, chiefs did play an analogous role, brokering between two entirely different social and ethical systems, which existed at different times of year. During the rainy season, the Nambikwara occupied hilltop villages of several hundred people and practised horticulture; during the rest of the year they dispersed into small foraging bands. Chiefs made or lost their reputations by acting as heroic leaders during the “nomadic adventures” of the dry season, during which times they typically gave orders, resolved crises and behaved in what would at any other time be considered an unacceptably authoritarian manner. Then, in the rainy season, a time of much greater ease and abundance, they relied on those reputations to attract followers to settle around them in villages, where they employed only gentle persuasion and led by example to guide their followers in the construction of houses and tending of gardens. They cared for the sick and needy, mediated disputes and never imposed anything on anyone.

How should we think about these chiefs? They were not patriarchs, Lévi-Strauss concluded; neither were they petty tyrants; and there was no sense in which they were invested with mystical powers. More than anything, they resembled modern politicians operating tiny embryonic welfare states, pooling resources and doling them out to those in need. What impressed Lévi-Strauss above all was their political maturity. It was the chiefs’ skill in directing small bands of dry-season foragers, of making snap decisions in crises (crossing a river, directing a hunt) that later qualified them to play the role of mediators and diplomats in the village plaza. And in doing so they were effectively moving back and forth, each year, between what evolutionary anthropologists insist on thinking of as totally different stages of social development: from hunters-gatherers to farmers and back again.

Nambikwara chiefs were in every sense self-conscious political actors, shifting between two different social systems with calm sophistication, all the while balancing a sense of personal ambition with the common good. What’s more, their flexibility and adaptability enabled them to take a distanced perspective on whichever system obtained at any given time.

Let’s return to those rich Upper Palaeolithic burials, so often interpreted as evidence for the emergence of “inequality”, or even hereditary nobility of some sort. For some odd reason, those who make such arguments never seem to notice that a quite remarkable number of these skeletons bear evidence of striking physical anomalies that could only have marked them out, clearly and dramatically, from their social surroundings. The adolescent boys in Sunghir and Dolní Věstonice had pronounced congenital disfigurements; other ancient burial sites have contained bodies that were unusually short or extremely tall.

It would be extremely surprising if this were a coincidence. In fact, it makes one wonder whether even those bodies, which appear from their skeletal remains to be anatomically typical, might have been equally striking in some other way; after all, an albino, for example, or an epileptic prophet would not be identifiable as such from the archaeological record. We can’t know much about the day-to-day lives of Palaeolithic individuals buried with rich grave goods, other than that they seem to have been as well fed and cared for as anybody else; but we can at least suggest they were seen as the ultimate individuals, about as different from their peers as it was possible to be.

This suggests we might have to shelve any premature talk of the emergence of hereditary elites. It seems very unlikely that Palaeolithic Europe produced a stratified elite that just happened to consist largely of hunchbacks, giants and dwarves. Second, we don’t know how much the treatment of such individuals after death had to do with their treatment in life. Another important point here is that we are not dealing with a case of some people being buried with rich grave goods and others being buried with none. The very practice of burying bodies intact, and clothed, appears to have been exceptional in the Upper Palaeolithic. Most corpses were treated in completely different ways: de-fleshed, broken up, curated, or even processed into jewellery and artefacts. (In general, Palaeolithic people were clearly much more at home with human body parts than we are.)

The corpse in its complete and articulated form – and the clothed corpse even more so – was clearly something unusual and, one would presume, inherently strange. In many such cases, an effort was made to contain the bodies of the Upper Palaeolithic dead by covering them with heavy objects: mammoth scapulae, wooden planks, stones or tight bindings. Perhaps saturating them with such objects was an extension of these concerns about strangeness, celebrating but also containing something dangerous. This too makes sense. The ethnographic record abounds with examples of anomalous beings – human or otherwise – treated as exalted and dangerous; or one way in life, another in death.

Much here is speculation. There are any number of other interpretations that could be placed on the evidence – though the idea that these tombs mark the emergence of some sort of hereditary aristocracy seems the least likely of all. Those interred were extraordinary, “extreme” individuals. The way their corpses were decorated, displayed and buried marked them out as equally extraordinary in death. Anomalous in almost every respect, such burials can hardly be interpreted as proxies for social structure among the living. On the other hand, they clearly have something to do with all the contemporary evidence for music, sculpture, painting and complex architecture. What is one to make of them?

This is where seasonality comes into the picture. Almost all the ice age sites with extraordinary burials and monumental architecture were created by societies that lived a little like Lévi-Strauss’s Nambikwara, dispersing into foraging bands at one time of year, gathering together in concentrated settlements at another. True, they didn’t gather to plant crops. Rather, the large Upper Palaeolithic sites are linked to migrations and seasonal hunting of game herds – woolly mammoth, steppe bison or reindeer – as well as cyclical fish-runs and nut harvests. This seems to be the explanation for those hubs of activity found in eastern Europe at places like Dolní Věstonice, where people took advantage of an abundance of wild resources to feast, engage in complex rituals and ambitious artistic projects, and trade minerals, marine shells and furs. In western Europe, equivalents would be the great rock shelters of the French Périgord and the Cantabrian coast, with their deep records of human activity, which similarly formed part of an annual round of seasonal congregation and dispersal.

Archaeology also shows that patterns of seasonal variation lie behind the monuments of Göbekli Tepe. Activities around the stone temples correspond with periods of annual superabundance, between midsummer and autumn, when large herds of gazelle descended on to the Harran plain. At such times, people also gathered at the site to process massive quantities of nuts and wild cereal grasses, making these into festive foods, which presumably fuelled the work of construction. There is some evidence to suggest that each of these great structures had a relatively short lifespan, culminating in an enormous feast, after which its walls were rapidly filled in with leftovers and other refuse: hierarchies raised to the sky, only to be swiftly torn down again. Ongoing research is likely to complicate this picture, but the overall pattern of seasonal congregation for festive labour seems well established.

Such oscillating patterns of life endured long after the invention of agriculture. They may be key to understanding the famous Neolithic monuments of Salisbury Plain in England, and not just because the arrangements of standing stones themselves seem to function (among other things) as giant calendars. Stonehenge, framing the midsummer sunrise and the midwinter sunset, is the most famous of these monuments. It turns out to have been the last in a long sequence of ceremonial structures, erected over the course of centuries in timber as well as stone, as people converged on the plain from remote corners of the British Isles at significant times of year. Careful excavation shows that many of these structures were dismantled just a few generations after their construction.

Still more striking, the people who built Stonehenge were not farmers, or not in the usual sense. They had once been; but the practice of erecting and dismantling grand monuments coincides with a period when the peoples of Britain, having adopted the Neolithic farming economy from continental Europe, appear to have turned their backs on at least one crucial aspect of it: they abandoned the cultivation of cereals and returned, from around 3300BC, to the collection of hazelnuts as their staple source of plant food. On the other hand, they kept hold of their domestic pigs and herds of cattle, feasting on them seasonally at nearby Durrington Walls, a prosperous town of some thousands of people – with its own Woodhenge – in winter, but largely empty and abandoned in summer.

All this is crucial because it’s hard to imagine how giving up agriculture could have been anything but a self-conscious decision. There is no evidence that one population displaced another, or that farmers were somehow overwhelmed by powerful foragers who forced them to abandon their crops. The Neolithic inhabitants of England appear to have taken the measure of cereal-farming and collectively decided that they preferred to live another way. We’ll never know how such a decision was made, but Stonehenge itself provides something of a hint since it is built of extremely large stones, some of which (the “bluestones”) were transported from as far away as Wales, while many of the cattle and pigs consumed at Durrington Walls were laboriously herded there from other distant locations.

In other words, and remarkable as it may seem, even in the third millennium BC coordination of some sort was clearly possible across large parts of the British Isles. If Stonehenge was a shrine to exalted founders of a ruling clan – as some archaeologists now argue – it seems likely that members of their lineage claimed significant, even cosmic roles by virtue of their involvement in such events. On the other hand, patterns of seasonal aggregation and dispersal raise another question: if there were kings and queens at Stonehenge, exactly what sort could they have been? After all, these would have been kings whose courts and kingdoms existed for only a few months of the year, and otherwise dispersed into small communities of nut gatherers and stock herders. If they possessed the means to marshal labour, pile up food resources and provender armies of year-round retainers, what sort of royalty would consciously elect not to do so?

Recall that for Lévi-Strauss, there was a clear link between seasonal variations of social structure and a certain kind of political freedom. The fact that one structure applied in the rainy season and another in the dry allowed Nambikwara chiefs to view their own social arrangements at one remove: to see them as not simply “given”, in the natural order of things, but as something at least partially open to human intervention. The case of the British Neolithic – with its alternating phases of dispersal and monumental construction – indicates just how far such intervention could sometimes go.

The political implications of this are important, as Lévi-Strauss noted. What the existence of similar seasonal patterns in the Palaeolithic suggests is that from the very beginning, or at least as far back as we can trace such things, human beings were self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities.

It’s easy to see why scholars in the 1950s and 60s arguing for the existence of discrete stages of political organisation – successively: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states – did not know what to do with Lévi-Strauss’s observations. They held that the stages of political development mapped, at least very roughly, on to similar stages of economic development: hunter-gatherers, gardeners, farmers, industrial civilisation. It was confusing enough that people like the Nambikwara seemed to jump back and forth, over the course of the year, between economic categories. Other groups would appear to jump regularly from one end of the political spectrum to the other. In other words, they threw everything askew.

Seasonal dualism also throws into chaos more recent efforts at classifying hunter-gatherers into either “simple” or “complex” types of social organisation, since what have been identified as the features of “complexity” – territoriality, social ranks, material wealth or competitive display – appear during certain seasons of the year, only to be brushed aside in others by the exact same population. Admittedly, most professional anthropologists nowadays have come to recognise that these categories are hopelessly inadequate, but the main effect of this acknowledgment has just been to cause them to change the subject, or suggest that perhaps we shouldn’t really be thinking about the broad sweep of human history at all any more. Nobody has yet proposed an alternative.

Meanwhile, as we’ve seen, archaeological evidence is piling up to suggest that in the highly seasonal environments of the last ice age, our remote ancestors were behaving much like Nambikwara. They shifted back and forth between alternative social arrangements, building monuments and then closing them down again, allowing the rise of authoritarian structures during certain times of year then dismantling them. The same individual could experience life in what looks to us sometimes like a band, sometimes a tribe, and sometimes like something with at least some of the characteristics we now identify with states.

With such institutional flexibility comes the capacity to step outside the boundaries of any given structure and reflect; to make and unmake the political worlds we live in. If nothing else, this explains the “princes” and “princesses” of the last ice age, who appear to show up, in such magnificent isolation, like characters in some kind of fairytale or costume drama. If they reigned at all, then perhaps it was, like the ruling clans of Stonehenge, just for a season.

If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, perhaps the question we should ask is: how did we get stuck? How did we lose that political self-consciousness, once so typical of our species? How did we come to treat eminence and subservience not as temporary expedients, or even the pomp and circumstance of some kind of grand seasonal theatre, but as inescapable elements of the human condition?

In truth, this flexibility, and potential for political self-consciousness, was never entirely lost. Seasonality is still with us – even if it is a pale shadow of its former self. In the Christian world, for instance, there is still the midwinter “holiday season” in which values and forms of organisation do, to a limited degree, reverse themselves: the same media and advertisers who for most of the year peddle rabid consumerist individualism suddenly start announcing that social relations are what’s really important, and that to give is better than to receive.

Among societies like the Inuit or the Kwakiutl of Canada’s Northwest Coast, times of seasonal congregation were also ritual seasons, almost entirely given over to dances, rites and dramas. Sometimes, these could involve creating temporary kings or even ritual police with real coercive powers. In other cases, they involved dissolving norms of hierarchy and propriety. In the European middle ages, saints’ days alternated between solemn pageants where all the elaborate ranks and hierarchies of feudal life were made manifest, and crazy carnivals in which everyone played at “turning the world upside down”. In carnival, women might rule over men and children be put in charge of government. Servants could demand work from their masters, ancestors could return from the dead, “carnival kings” could be crowned and then dethroned, giant monuments like wicker dragons built and set on fire, or all formal ranks might even disintegrate into one or other form of bacchanalian chaos.

What’s important about such festivals is that they kept the old spark of political self-consciousness alive. They allowed people to imagine that other arrangements are feasible, even for society as a whole, since it was always possible to fantasise about carnival bursting its seams and becoming the new reality. May Day came to be chosen as the date for the international workers’ holiday largely because so many British peasant revolts had historically begun on that riotous festival. Villagers who played at “turning the world upside down” would periodically decide they actually preferred the world upside down, and took measures to keep it that way.

Medieval peasants often found it much easier than medieval intellectuals to imagine a society of equals. Now, perhaps, we begin to understand why. Seasonal festivals may be a pale echo of older patterns of seasonal variation – but, for the last few thousand years of human history at least, they appear to have played much the same role in fostering political self-consciousness, and as laboratories of social possibility.

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Adapted from The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity – by David Graeber and David Wengrow, published by Allen Lane. To order a copy, go to Guardian Bookshop

source: The Guardian

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For two thousand years, the peoples residing in Zomia — the mountainous region that stretches from the Central Highlands of Vietnam to northeastern India — have fled the organized state societies in the valleys. Far from being ‘remnants’ left behind by civilizing societies, they are “barbarians by choice”, peoples who have deliberately put distance between themselves and lowland, state-centers.

James Scott, director of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University, tells the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination.

The event was Cornell’s eighth Frank H. Golay Memorial Lecture.

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You can READ the book The art of not being governed : an anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia – by Scott, James C here:

https://law.yale.edu/system/files/documents/pdf/Intellectual_Life/LTW-Scott.pdf

Zomia is a new name for virtually all the lands at altitudes above roughly three hundred meters all the way from the Central Highlands of Vietnam to northeastern India and traversing five Southeast Asian nations (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Burma) and four provinces of China (Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi, and parts of Sichuan). It is an expanse of 2.5 million square kilometers containing about one hundred million minority peoples of truly bewildering ethnic and linguistic variety. Geographically, it is also known as the Southeast Asian mainland massif. Since this huge area is at the periphery of nine states and at the center of none, since it also bestrides the usual regional designations (Southeast Asia, East Asia, South Asia), and since what makes it interesting is its ecological variety as well as its relation to states, it represents a novel object of study, a kind of transnational Appalachia, and a new way to think of area studies.

My thesis is simple, suggestive, and controversial. Zomia is the largest remaining region of the world whose peoples have not yet been fully incorporated into nation-states. Its days are numbered. Not so very long ago, however, such self-governing peoples were the great majority of humankind. Today, they are seen from the valley kingdoms as “our living ancestors,” “what we were like before we discovered wet-rice cultivation, Buddhism, and civilization.” On the contrary, I argue that hill peoples are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare.

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More books about Anarchism in Void Network Library: https://voidnetwork.gr/library/

The post The Art of Not Being Governed: Hill Peoples and Valley Kingdoms in Mainland Southeast Asia appeared first on Void Network.

In two previous essay, I discussed the role of the Left in protecting the police through cautious reformism, and the effectiveness of a pacified, falsified—in a word disarmed—history of the Civil Rights movement to prevent us from learning from previous struggles and achieving a meaningful change in society.

The police are a racist, authoritarian institution that exists to protect the powerful in an unequal system. Past and present efforts to reform them have demonstrated that reformism can’t solve the problem, though it does serve to squander popular protests and advance the careers of professional activists. Faced with this situation, in which Left and Right unwittingly collude to prolong the problem, the extralegal path of rioting, seizing space, and fighting back against the police makes perfect sense. In fact, this phenomenon, denounced as “violence” by the media, the police, and many activists in unison, was not only the most significant feature of the Ferguson (and Baltimore) rebellion and the solidarity protests organized in hundreds of other cities, it was also the vital element that made everything else possible, that distinguished the killing of Michael Brown from a hundred other police murders. What’s more, self-defense against state violence (whether excercized by police or by tolerated paramilitaries like the Klan) is not an exceptional occurrence in a long historical perspective, but a tried and true form of resistance, and one of the only that has brought results, in the Civil Rights movement and earlier.

What remains is to speak about possibilities that are radically external to the self-regulating cycle of tragedy and reform. What remains is to speak loudly and clearly about a world without police.

We don’t want better police. We don’t want to fix the police. On the contrary, we understand that the police work quite well; they simply do not work for us and they never have. We want to get rid of the police entirely, and we want to live in a world where police are not necessary.

Far from being a naïve position, I believe it is the only one that can withstand serious scrutiny, whether in the form of a comprehensive historical analysis of the role and evolution of police and the effectiveness of reform movements, or of an examination of the breadth of possibility that human societies have already demonstrated.

No one can effectively argue that the police are necessary in an absolute sense. They are a relatively recent invention, as far as institutions go. The only question is what kind of society needs police, and whether that kind of society makes the systematic murders, torture, beatings, and surveillance worth it.

Dennis Sullivan and Larry Tifft have compiled a great deal of information on societies that use various forms of conflict resolution in which an organization such as the police has no place. From the Diné (Navajo) to the Semai, there are dozens of societies—all of them impacted to varying degrees by Western colonialism—that have practiced restorative or transformative justice, dealing with cases of conflict or social harm without ever having to be so brutal as to lock people up in cages or create an elite body designed to surveille people or mobilize organized violence against those who transgress set laws. They compare neighboring societies that face similar socio-economic conditions but use different strategies for dealing with harm, as well as Western societies that make minimal usage of policing and judicial apparatuses.

A pattern that becomes immediately evident is that police and prisons are only necessary in societies that are based on exploitation and inequality. The police are not an instrument fit to protect a society; on the contrary they are an instrument fit to protect an elite, parasitical class from society. Any society with a minimal practice of cooperation and solidarity can protect itself from individuals who would harm others. A hierarchical, militarized force such as the police, or an institution like the prison designed to remove conflict and transgression from the social sphere, only makes sense where there is a parasitical social class that exists in antagonism with the rest of society, and needs to manage social norms of right and wrong and monopolize violent force in order to preserve its power. Such a class also needs a justice mechanism, such as courts and a legislative body, to formalize its conception of right and wrong, and a propaganda mechanism, whether a state religion or mass media, to ensure that the exploited majority identify with their masters and reproduce the norms of the elite. When a normal person speaks out against throwing rocks at the police or destroying businesses, they are expressing values that originate at the top of the social pyramid.

Of course it gets more complicated when you realize that interests are always subjective, and people often get more out of identifying with a larger community, no matter how fictitious, than they do out of having food to eat or a roof over their heads. In the end, everyone from the CEO to the news anchor to the taxi driver or homebum with conventional ideas all participate in reproducing the same system, and they probably all sincerely believe in the positions they espouse, but some clearly have more influence than others, and can be identified as originators of certain aspects of the present system.

Therefore, we are not speaking for the masses when we assert that the police and the prisons exist to control them, but we should also not shy away from espousing a radical position just because it will be unpopular. We need to have faith that a great many people might eventually come to support radical positions regarding the police. Many people already support parts of these positions intuitively or implicitly, and the reason that more people don’t, at least not expressly, is that so few people currently dare to declare the police an intractable enemy of freedom or to openly advocate a world without police. At this juncture, the last thing that we need is for more people to espouse tepid, inane suggestions for reform that are completely untenable and unrealistic. But as long as proposals for meager reform are taken seriously, that’s what we’ll get.

We can’t get rid of police brutality without getting rid of the police, and we can’t get rid of the police without getting rid of an entire system based on exploitation, oppression, and hierarchy. There is no easy, band-aid solution to this problem, and bandying them about only perpetuates the problem. Foregrounding difficult, far-reaching changes does not mean, however, fixating an abstract gaze on a pre-designed future and blinding ourselves to immediate problems. On the contrary, we need to focus on how we fight now for a better world, and part of that means avoiding forms of action that make real changes even more improbable.

As I argued in Part II, most of what was achieved in the Civil Rights movement in terms of short-term changes was achieved when people armed themselves, took over their streets, and fought back without worrying about ruling class taboos against lower class violence. If we fight for total social transformation without proposing naïve reforms, those in power will trip over themselves trying to buy us off with quick fixes and opportunities to participate in the system.

This in fact is how most social movements in history have gone down. Whatever improvements have been won were actually won by those who fought for radical positions, using uncompromising methods and aggressive tactics, though the victories were claimed by the reformers, who tend to be a combination of dissident members of the ruling structures, opportunists who wish to climb the social ladder, and sincere people who have been duped by a discourse of pragmatism. Their own methods are too sedate to shake things up and force a change, in fact their timidity demonstrates to authority that they are ultimately a loyal opposition undeserving of repression. They must ride the coattails of the radicals in order to be in position when the rulers realize that some change is necessary in order to avoid an actual revolution. The reason that these movements always stop after an incomplete reform, and that the most ineffective sectors of these movements tend to get the credit, is because the reformers have a tendency to throw the radicals under the bus, helping the State eliminate them in exchange for access to power in its newly reformed configuration. After all, who better to discern what reform will best fool the people on bottom than someone who has recently come up from the bottom?

I previously mentioned that a police apparatus cannot exist without a hierarchical society, a prison system, a justice system, and some kind of culture industry, whether religious or mediatic. All of these institutions defend a ruling structure against the conflicts generated by its antagonistic position towards society. Modern democracies go a step further, however; if conflict with society is inevitable, why not manage it rather than trying to suppress it?

In Ferguson, the managers of social conflict were in large part those activists who preached nonviolence and denounced the rioters, as I mentioned in Part I. But there is an important kind of management I neglected to mention.

Those of us who are critical of the mass media may have a hard time explaining the sympathetic position that Time Magazine or Rolling Stone occasionally took with the rioters. Of course, a couple articles hardly make up for thousands of syndicated columns objectively refering to rioters as some kind of pathological parasite, radio hosts calling looters “idiots” and worse, TV spots spreading fear about savage hordes of demons and outside agitators, days long NPR marathons urging peaceful protest, and so on. Nonetheless, the phenomenon is curious as well as significant. In the case of Rolling Stone, we could suppose that this old establishment rag is afraid of all the ground it has lost in the risqué news niche to dynamic newcomers like Vice; however the explanation would be insufficient.

The seemingly subversive behavior of a few outliers is hardly unprecedented. In the recent insurrection in Greece, a large part of the media expressed sympathy with the rioters, albeit in a very formulaic way. In the media lens, young students were justifiably protesting in the streets after the police murder of 15-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos, anarchists were hijacking the event to burn police stations, and immigrants were taking advantage of the situation to loot stores. None of these characterizations are based on fact. Millions of young people and old, Greeks and immigrants, participated in the uprising, in a variety of ways. Many students looted, many immigrants walked along with protests. A frequently expressed sentiment was that participation in the insurrection blurred all of these pre-established identities, in which case the media operation clearly intended to reassert them. With all three subjects, the media caricature refers to a prefabricated figure that the entire population was already familiar with—the socially concerned student, the pyromaniac anarchist, the criminal immigrant—that only ever existed on the glowing screen, because it was the media themselves that created it. That’s the brilliance of the media: they rarely have to verify their claims, because they operate within a virtual universe that they themselves have created.

In the Greek example, it is obvious why the media would sympathize with student rioting: to discourage non-students from participating or identifying with the uprising; and to establish a limit of acceptable tactics, implicitly criminalizing the looting and the attacks on police stations. After all, the intensity of street fighting over three uninterrupted weeks was forcing the government to consider calling in the military. They were willing to tolerate burning barricades and illegal protests if things didn’t go further.

Likewise, when people start to bring guns to protests as in Ferguson, there will be those among the forces of law and order who begin to see the wisdom in tolerating the smashing of banks. It’s noteworthy that the media only begin to stomach property destruction when talk of shooting back begins to resonate throughout society. And though within the confines of American dialogue, it feels like a breath of fresh air that Time Magazine would sympathize with rioters, it is a more or less calculated move that functions to limit the growth of resistance. Even if the editors of a magazine are not scheming consciously and explicitly about how to maintain social control, they are still individuals with a vested interest in the current system. People fighting fiercely for their freedom, unlike those who compulsively walk in circles or stage die-ins, often force a recognition of their humanity and win a limited sympathy from their enemies. They also make the existence of a social conflict undeniable. In such a case, people in power may come to accept tactics that they had previously condemned, to acknowledge errors they had previously denied, but their condemnation of forms of rebellion that are irreversibly destabilizing will only crystalize. People can be permitted to blow off steam, even in illegal ways, but they cannot be permitted to blunt or sabotage the instruments of the State. And when the police confront an armed population, they are suddenly much less effective.

Another way that exceptional dissent might manifest is in the realm of discourse and research. I am by no means the first person to express the idea that the police should be abolished, nor is this idea entirely strange in acceptable discourse among people who are much better dressed than I am. However the elaboration of these discourses must be couched in certain ways to signal their usefulness to the State, and their separation from communities in struggle.

If we assert that it is not permitted to speak of a world without police, this is only true if we understand the police as one function in an interlocking system of domination, and the abolition of the police means the abolition of that entire system. Otherwise, there is a great deal of research and debate that maps out the possibilities of prison abolition or an end to policing as we know it. But what is the actual meaning and effect of this discourse?

I would start by arguing that the vast majority of those who conduct this theoretical labor have good intentions. But we also know what they say about good intentions, and the paving stones on the road to hell are not nearly as substantial as the ones being thrown at cops in Ferguson and elsewhere. With this facile figure of speech, I actually mean to suggest a different criterion for evaluating our actions.

I gladly admit that the information produced by academics or activists who theorize about prison abolition or a world without police is thought-provoking and useful. I have cited a few examples of it in this essay. But just as we must ask why Time Magazine would sympathize with rioters, we should ask why there exist paid positions for people to study prison abolition. Either capitalism isn’t a totality, or the prisons and the police are not an integral part of power, or power benefits somehow by studying its own abolition.

I believe the answer lies between the second and the third possibilities. Even though the abolition of prisons is not a likely future, from the present vantage, democratic capitalism increases its chances for survival by exploring contingency plans for extreme cases, and by giving opponents employment opportunities. The advantage is increased if “prisons” or “police” can be discursively transformed from an integral element of a whole system into a particular appendage that can be discarded or modified. And there are few methods of discourse more suited to carrying out this transformation than the academic—which favors specificity and an analysis of parts over wholes—and the activist—which tends towards single-issue messaging that favors the myopic over the radical.

Someone in the academy or in the world of professional activism can study the police for all the right reasons, personally holding a global analysis of the integral role of police within a greater whole, but the institutional formulae of applying for grants, publishing articles, and claiming concrete improvements all modulate those individuals’ activity to favor a piecemeal worldview and to direct discourse at other power-holders.

It may sound like a platitude but I believe experience in struggle bears it out: you cannot abolish that with which you dialogue. State authority above all thrives on being present in every social conversation. A conversation with employers, legislators, grant-writers, or experts about the abolition of the police necessarily assumes the replacement of one form of policing with another.

The modern prison was born out of the abolition of the scaffold. Community policing was a survival mechanism after the defeats and the unpopularity of the police caused by the struggles of the ’60s. The danger is real.

Even without a far-reaching reform that allows the powerful to regenerate their methods for accumulating power, radical discourses in professional channels present other problems. One I have already hinted at can be thought of as misdirection.

Let’s imagine an organization that focuses on prison abolition. Their employees are sincere, dedicated activists, some of them proven veterans of past struggles. Nearly all of them are college graduates, and some might be academics; otherwise they stay in close contact with the experts who produce facts that make it easier to argue for prison abolition in polite circles. They produce many valuable materials that can be useful for supporting prisoners or changing people’s opinions about the prison system, and they may even have a pilot project on a couple blocks in a specific neighborhood, designed to decrease reliance on the prison industrial complex.

Taken individually, all of these things are great. We need more people who are talking about a world without prisons. But the ideas that this hypothetical organization spreads, how do they direct people’s attentions, particularly in a moment of social rebellion?

When such an organization, with paid staff, non-profit status, cred, but also rules to play by and bills to pay, proclaims that “We need to abolish the police and the prisons,” what is the practical implication? “Therefore this organization should receive more grants and this law should not be passed,” or “therefore these people who took up arms against the police deserve our support”? Clearly, it’s not the latter.

A professional approach to tackling the social problems underscored by Ferguson rarely returns people’s energies and attentions to the streets, where real change is created. True, most of the time, we don’t have something like Ferguson going on, so a patient, gradualist method seems to make sense. However, the conservatism of the professional approach often leads activists to play a pacifying role when a moment of intense struggle arises, as we abundantly witnessed this August and again in November. All across the country, even where they refrained from denouncing rioters, activist organizations called for vigils and speak-outs, when it was clear that the time for mere words had passed. Directly or indirectly, these mobilizations allowed a middle-class constituency to monopolize the social response and prevent rioting, at a time when an unprecedented number of people were ready to fight back.

What’s more, the assumptions are all wrong. Ferguson is only exceptional in its extension, not in its spirit. Not a month goes by when someone does not shoot back at the police in America. Most of the time, however, they are a lone shooter, they often kill themselves or die in the act, and the media always publish unsavory details about their personal lives, true or invented. They also portray the cops as heroes, no matter what kind of people they actually were, and they never entertain the possibility that the shooters were justified, as they always do when it’s cops doing the murdering (actually, this is too charitable a description; many media outlets assert from the beginning that the killing was justified, not even allowing a debate). The recent shooting of the two cops in NYC fits the pattern perfectly, but earlier cases like that of Christopher Monfort in Seattle, Eric Frein in Pennsylvania, or Christopher Dorner in LA also apply. None of this should be surprising. There is a certain schizophrenia in a society that glorifies the police and suppresses or distorts any honest conversation about what people actually experience at the hands of police and what sort of countermeasures are adequate or justified. If large numbers of alienated people feel entirely alone in their brutalization and dehumanization by police, collective resistance becomes impossible. The only people to express an active negation of the police will be individuals who reach a certain limit and then snap. By the very nature of the problem they are not going to be the stable ones, especially if mental health is defined as an infinite capacity to accomodate misery.

In Ferguson, rioters spraypainted the QT with the phrase, “free Kevin Johnson”, referring to a black man from an aggressively gentrifying St. Louis suburb who is on death row since 2008. Johnson shot to death an infamous bully of a cop who refused to help his kid brother as he lay dying from a heart condition. There is a direct connection between what are portrayed as isolated outbursts of senseless violence, and the massive rebellions that force society to at least stop and pay attention. I don’t, however, see the professionals making this connection. Typically they are either silent or help pathologize the lone wolves. The tragedy is, such incidents are only isolated as long as people in power AND people in social movements continue to actively isolate them.

Recognizing the basic legitimacy of these acts isn’t to glorify the shooters as heroes. There is something sad in any death, no matter who the victim is, and we’re in dire straits when the only available means of resistance that people think they have are directly suicidal. The point is, there is a direct connection between the systematic brutality of police and the appearance of people who shoot back. Denying it only maintains the schizophrenic condition that forces us to pathologize a sensible human response to systematic abuse, preserves our psychological loyalty to a system that treats us like fodder, and prevents the development of collective measures.

There have been attempts in the US to develop and spread methods of resistance to police that are collective, that brook no compromise, and that are less dangerous, less suicidal, than the method of the lone gunmen. The best known is probably the “black bloc.” And though it is clearly an imperfect tool, the bloc typically faces blanket denunciations by people who make no attempts to propose alternatives. In NGO-land, the trope that has been circulated is that the black bloc is the domain of young white men. Never mind that there are many testimonials by women, queer, and trans people attempting to counter this lie (and at great personal risk, since it requires speaking about personal involvement in an illegal activity); never mind that American anarchists have learned about the tactic not only in Europe but also in Latin America, where it is widely popular. The denunciations cannot be taken seriously as criticisms because they do not rely on realistic portrayals of the black bloc, they are formulated to silence rather than to engage, and they do not propose any alternatives for seizing space or collectively fighting back against police.

The extent to which this trope has been circulated by the corporate media reveals just how liberatory the thinking behind it truly is.

But the black bloc is just one possibility among many, and while it helps demonstrators protect themselves in rowdy street confrontations, it does not suggest to most people the vision of another world. Talking about a world without police in the here and now, without paving the way for our own co-optation is a big order to fill. Fortunately, the conversation is already ongoing.

We have the examples of societies that thrived without police, which I mentioned towards the beginning of the essay. Those stories belong to other cultures. I don’t think Westerners should use them as models or as ideological capital, but I think we should recognize their existence, to break the stranglehold that Western civilization has over definitions of human nature and human possibility, and we should also recognize that those other forms of being were violently interrupted by processes of colonization that are still ongoing. They are not marginal, idyllic stories of “primitive” societies with no bearing on modern reality, they are histories of peoples who are still struggling for survival. If, in the worlds we dream of, there is no room for them to reassert themselves independent of our designs, then whatever we create will only be a continuation of the thing we are fighting against.

More appropriate as inspiration for our own action are a number of stories of struggle in Western or westernized countries in which people created police-free zones on the ground. After all, a holistic critique of the police means that by the very nature of the problem, we cannot ask government to institute the needed changes. Real steps towards a world without police can be found in the riots in Ferguson and other cities around the country where people surpassed their self-appointed leaders and actually fought back, rather than just manufacturing yet another spectacle of symbolic dissent. The riots in Ferguson were not only important in an instrumental way, forcing all of society to consider the problem; they also suggested the beginnings of a solution as neighbors came together in solidarity, building new relations amongst themselves, and forcefully ejecting police from the neighborhoods they patrol.

Christiania is an autonomous neighborhood of Copenhagen that has been squatted since 1971. The area, with nearly a thousand inhabitants, organizes itself in assemblies, maintains its own economy and infrastructure, cleans up its trash, produces bicycles and other items in collective workshops, and runs a number of communal spaces. They also resolve their own conflicts, and with the exception of some aggressive incursions and raids, Christiania has been a police-free zone for most of its existence. Initially, the Danish government opted for a soft strategy, hoping that Christiania would eventually fall apart on its own. In the same era, the autonomous movement in the Netherlands and Germany was fighting major battles to defend their squatted spaces, sometimes defeating the police in the streets or burning down shopping malls in retribution for evictions. In context, the Danish approach made sense. However, Christiania thrived. Some suspect that the government was behind the crisis that threatened the autonomous neighborhood’s existence in 1984 when a motorcycle gang moved into the police-free zone to begin selling hard drugs (soft drugs have always been widely used in Christinia, while addictive drugs are vehemently discouraged).

Earlier in Christiania’s history, there had been a fierce debate about how to deal with the problem of drugs. Over intense opposition, a part of the neighborhood decided to request police assistance, but they soon found that the cops were arresting the users of non-addictive drugs and ignoring or even protecting the proliferation of hard drugs. After that, Christiania decided to keep the police out, and their autonomy was well established by the time the motorcycle gang moved in. The gangsters thought they had picked an easy target: a neighborhood of hippies who not only disavowed making use of the police, they actively kept the police out. These drug-pushers, however, had fallen for capitalist mythology, which presents us all as isolated individuals, vulnerable to organized delinquents, and therefore in need of the greatest protection racket of them all, the State. Christiania residents banded together, exercising the same principle of solidarity that was at work in all the other aspects of their lives, fought back, and kicked the motorcycle gang out, using a combination of sabotage, public meetings, pressure, and direct confrontation.

It is no coincidence that the same tools and capacities that allow us to fight back and free ourselves from policing are also the ones we need to protect ourselves from the forms of harm that capitalist democracies prosecute under the rubric of “crime”. Crime and police are two sides of the same coin. They perpetuate each other, and they each rely on a vulnerable, atomized society. A healthy society would have no need for police, no more than it would lock people in cages and hide its problems out of sight rather than deal with the conflicts and deficiencies that led to an act of harm being committed in the first place.

The mutual relationship between police and crime was exquisitely revealed during the popular uprising in Oaxaca in 2006. In June of that year, police viciously attacked the massive encampment staged annually by striking teachers. But the teach ers fought back tooth and nail, quickly joined by many neighbors. They pushed police out of Oaxaca City, which remained autonomous for five months along with large parts of the countryside. People built barricades, which became an important space for socialization as well as self-defense, and they organized topiles, an indigenous tradition that provided volunteers to fight back against police and paramilitaries as well as to look out for fires, acts of robbery, or assault.

The defenders of Oaxaca soon learned that the police were releasing people from their prisons on the condition that they go into the city to commit crimes. In protecting their neighborhoods against these acts, the topiles did not function like Western police forces. They patrolled unarmed, they were volunteers, and they did not have a prerogative to arrest people or impose their will, the way cops do. Upon coming across a robbery, arson, or assault, their function was not only that of first responders, but also to call on the neighbors so everyone could respond collectively. With such a structure, it would be impossible to enforce a legal code against an activity with popular participation. In other words, the topiles could stop a stranger who was robbing the store of a local, working class person (as were many of the neighborhood stores in Oaxaca), but they couldn’t have stopped the neighbors themselves from looting a store they already had an antagonistic, classist relationship with, as was the case in Ferguson.

People in Oaxaca also had to defend themselves from police and paramilitaries, and they did so for five months. The topiles and many others were unarmed. They had to fight back with rocks, fireworks, and molotov cocktails, many of them getting shot in the process. Their bravery allowed hundreds of thousands of people to live in freedom for five months, in a police-free, government-free zone, experimenting with the self-organization of their lives on social, economic, and cultural levels. All the beautiful aspects of the Oaxaca commune are inseperable from their violent struggle against police, involving barricades, slingshots, molotov cocktails, and thousands of people who faced down armed opponents, over a dozen of them giving their lives in the process. In the end, the Mexican state had to send in the military as the only way to crush this flourishing pocket of autonomy.

If we learn from examples like Christiania, Oaxaca, and Ferguson itself, we can fight for a world without police and everything they represent, beginning here and now by creating blocks, neighborhoods, or even entire cities that are at least temporarily police-free zones. Within these spaces we can finally experiment and practice with solutions to all the other interrelated forms of oppression that plague us.

There is something beautiful about people finding the courage to fight back against a more powerful enemy, and people also flourish in surprising ways when they liberate space and take the power to organize their own lives. Neither of these things can be overemphasized. But neither should we romanticize. In the streets of Ferguson and other liberated spaces, much of the ugliness that infuses our society rears its head. But dealing with what had previously been invisible or normalized is an inevitable part of any healing process, and our society is nothing if not sick. Calamities like uprisings and riots can be important catalysts in processes of social healing, and liberated spaces, by forcefully casting aside the previous regime’s norms and relationships, that only functioned to reproduce and invisibilize all the ongoing forms of harm, can give us the opportunity to create new, healthier patterns, and engage in conversations that previously had been impossible. Empowering ourselves to fight back against those who have traumatized us, like the police, can be an important step in upsetting oppressive relations, healing from trauma, and restoring healthy social relations.

This is, however, a dangerous proposition. Fighting back against the police, especially shooting back at them, as was happening in Ferguson, is not a safe activity. Change is never safe. And if we can successfully overcome the police to create a liberated zone, the State will eventually send in the military. Are the soldiers still loyal enough, after these last wars, to open fire on us? Has enough been done to encourage dissension in the ranks, or is the government firmly in control? There is only one way to find out.

It is understandable that many people would not want to face the extreme risks involved with uprooting the oppressions that grip our society. There is nothing wrong with being afraid, so long as you have the courage to admit it. Some people, however, do a great disservice by muddying the waters with myopic proposals that have no hope of making an actual difference.

In the streets, we need to learn how to seize space, to make sure that those who fight back are never isolated, to make collective responses possible so no one has to react in an individual, suicidal way again, and to build a struggle that has room for young and old, for the peaceful and the bellicose, for those who know how to fight and those who know how to heal. It will be a long process, and in the meantime, there is a great need to speak loud and clear about a world without police, so everyone will know there is another way, beyond the false alternatives of obedience or ineffectual reform.

Peter Gelderloos has participated in various initiatives to support prisoners and push the police out of our neighborhoods. He is the author of several books, including Anarchy Works and The Failure of Nonviolence. 

He is a comrade and friend of Void Network from 2007 until today

source: http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/29/a-world-without-police/

The post A World Without Police by PETER GELDERLOOS appeared first on Void Network.

photos from Afghanistan in 70s, before CIA promoting Islam fundamentalists

A hundred years ago, it would have been unimaginable to have a pair of Muslim men enter a cafe or a public transportation vehicle, and then blow themselves up, killing dozens. Or to massacre the staff of a satirical magazine in Paris! Things like that were simply not done.

When you read the memoirs of Edward Said, or talk to old men and women in East Jerusalem, it becomes clear that the great part of Palestinian society used to be absolutely secular and moderate. It cared about life, culture, and even fashion, more than about religious dogmas.

The same could be said about many other Muslim societies, including those of Syria, Iraq, Iran, Egypt and Indonesia. Old photos speak for themselves. That is why it is so important to study old images again and again, carefully.

Islam is not only a religion; it is also an enormous culture, one of the greatest on Earth, which has enriched our humanity with some of the paramount scientific and architectural achievements, and with countless discoveries in the field of medicine. Muslims have written stunning poetry, and composed beautiful music. But above all, they developed some of the earliest social structures in the world, including enormous public hospitals and the first universities on earth, like The University of al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, Morocco.

The idea of ‘social’ was natural to many Muslim politicians, and had the West not brutally interfered, by overthrowing left-wing governments and putting on the throne fascist allies of London, Washington and Paris; almost all Muslim countries, including Iran, Egypt and Indonesia, would now most likely be socialist, under a group of very moderate and mostly secular leaders.

***

In the past, countless Muslim leaders stood up against the Western control of the world, and enormous figures like the Indonesian President, Ahmet Sukarno, were close to Communist Parties and ideologies. Sukarno even forged a global anti-imperialist movement, the Non-Allied movement, which was clearly defined during the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, in 1955.

That was in striking contrast to the conservative, elites-oriented Christianity, which mostly felt at home with the fascist rulers and colonialists, with the kings, traders and big business oligarchs.

For the Empire, the existence and popularity of progressive, Marxist, Muslim rulers governing the Middle East or resource-rich Indonesia, was something clearly unacceptable. If they were to use the natural wealth to improve the lives of their people, what was to be left for the Empire and its corporations? It had to be stopped by all means. Islam had to be divided, and infiltrated with radicals and anti-Communist cadres, and by those who couldn’t care less about the welfare of their people.

***

Almost all radical movements in today’s Islam, anywhere in the world, are tied to Wahhabism, an ultra-conservative, reactionary sect of Islam, which is in control of the political life of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other staunch allies of the West in the Gulf.

To quote Dr. Abdullah Mohammad Sindi:

“It is very clear from the historical record that without British help neither Wahhabism nor the House of Saud would be in existence today. Wahhabism is a British-inspired fundamentalist movement in Islam. Through its defense of the House of Saud, the US also supports Wahhabism directly and indirectly regardless of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Wahhabism is violent, right wing, ultra-conservative, rigid, extremist, reactionary, sexist, and intolerant…”

The West gave full support to the Wahhabis in the 1980s. They were employed, financed and armed, after the Soviet Union was dragged into Afghanistan and into a bitter war that lasted from 1979 to 1989. As a result of this war, the Soviet Union collapsed, exhausted both economically and psychologically.

The Mujahedeen, who were fighting the Soviets as well as the left-leaning government in Kabul, were encouraged and financed by the West and its allies. They came from all corners of the Muslim world, to fight a ‘Holy War’ against Communist infidels.

According to the US Department of State archives:

“Contingents of so-called Afghan Arabs and foreign fighters who wished to wage jihad against the atheist communists. Notable among them was a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden, whose Arab group eventually evolved into al-Qaeda.”

Muslim radical groups created and injected into various Muslim countries by the West included al-Qaeda, but also, more recently, ISIS (also known as ISIL). ISIS is an extremist army that was born in the ‘refugee camps’ on the Syrian/Turkish and Syrian/Jordanian borders, and which was financed by NATO and the West to fight the Syrian (secular) government of Bashar al-Assad.

Such radical implants have been serving several purposes. The West uses them as proxies in the wars it is fighting against its enemies – the countries that are still standing in the way to the Empire’s complete domination of the world. Then, somewhere down the road, after these extremist armies ‘get totally out of control’ (and they always will), they could serve as scarecrows and as justification for the ‘The War On Terror’, or, like after ISIS took Mosul, as an excuse for the re-engagement of Western troops in Iraq.

Stories about the radical Muslim groups have constantly been paraded on the front pages of newspapers and magazines, or shown on television monitors, reminding readers ‘how dangerous the world really is’, ‘how important Western engagement in it is’, and consequently, how important surveillance is, how indispensable security measures are, as well as tremendous ‘defense’ budgets and wars against countless rogue states.

***

From a peaceful and creative civilization, that used to lean towards socialism, the Muslim nations and Islam itself, found itself to be suddenly derailed, tricked, outmaneuvered, infiltrated by foreign religious and ideological implants, and transformed by the Western ideologues and propagandists into one ‘tremendous threat’; into the pinnacle and symbol of terrorism and intolerance.

The situation has been thoroughly grotesque, but nobody is really laughing – too many people have died as a result; too much has been destroyed!

Indonesia is one of the most striking historical examples of how such mechanisms of the destruction of progressive Muslim values, really functions:

In the 1950s and early 1960s, the US, Australia and the West in general, were increasingly ‘concerned’ about the progressive anti-imperialist and internationalist stand of President Sukarno, and about the increasing popularity of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI). But they were even more anxious about the enlightened, socialist and moderate Indonesian brand of Islam, which was clearly allying itself with Communist ideals.

Christian anti-Communist ideologues and ‘planners’, including the notorious Jesuit Joop Beek, infiltrated Indonesia. They set up clandestine organizations there, from ideological to paramilitary ones, helping the West to plan the coup that in and after 1965 took between 1 and 3 million human lives.

Shaped in the West, the extremely effective anti-Communist and anti-intellectual propaganda spread by Joop Beek and his cohorts also helped to brainwash many members of large Muslim organizations, propelling them into joining the killing of Leftists, immediately after the coup. Little did they know that Islam, not only Communism, was chosen as the main target of the pro-Western, Christian ‘fifth column’ inside Indonesia, or more precisely, the target was the left-leaning, liberal Islam.

After the 1965 coup, the Western-sponsored fascist dictator, General Suharto, used Joop Beek as his main advisor. He also relied on Beek’s ‘students’, ideologically. Economically, the regime related itself with mainly Christian business tycoons, including Liem Bian Kie.

In the most populous Muslim nation on earth, Indonesia, Muslims were sidelined, their ‘unreliable’ political parties banned during the dictatorship, and both the politics (covertly) and economy (overtly) fell under the strict control of Christian, pro-Western minority. To this day, this minority has its complex and venomous net of anti-Communist warriors, closely-knit business cartels and mafias, media and ‘educational outlets’ including private religious schools, as well as corrupt religious preachers (many played a role in the 1965 massacres), and other collaborators with both the local and global regime.

Indonesian Islam has been reduced to a silent majority, mostly poor and without any significant influence. It only makes international headlines when its frustrated white-robed militants go trashing bars, or when its extremists, many related to the Mujahedeen and the Soviet-Afghan War, go blowing up nightclubs, hotels or restaurants in Bali and Jakarta.

Or do they even do that, really?

Former President of Indonesia and progressive Muslim cleric, Abdurrahman Wahid (forced out of office by the elites), once told me: “I know who blew up the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta. It was not an attack by the Islamists; it was done by the Indonesian secret services, in order to justify their existence and budget, and to please the West.”

***

“I would argue that western imperialism has not so much forged an alliance with radical factions, as created them”, I was told, in London, by my friend, and leading progressive Muslim intellectual, Ziauddin Sardar.

And Mr. Sardar continued:

“We need to realize that colonialism did much more than simply damage Muslim nations and cultures. It played a major part in the suppression and eventual disappearance of knowledge and learning, thought and creativity, from Muslim cultures. Colonial encounter began by appropriating the knowledge and learning of Islam, which became the basis of the ‘European Renaissance’ and ‘the Enlightenment’ and ended by eradicating this knowledge and learning from both Muslim societies and from history itself. It did that both by physical elimination – destroying and closing down institutions of learning, banning certain types of indigenous knowledge, killing off local thinkers and scholars – and by rewriting History as the history of western civilization into which all minor histories of other civilization are subsumed.”

From the hopes of those post-WWII years, to the total gloom of the present days – what a long and terrible journey it has been!

The Muslim world is now injured, humiliated and confused, almost always on the defensive.

It is misunderstood by the outsiders, and often even by its own people who are frequently forced to rely on Western and Christian views of the world.

What used to make the culture of Islam so attractive – tolerance, learning, concern for the wellbeing of the people – has been amputated from the Muslim realm, destroyed from abroad. What was left was only religion.

Now most of the Muslim countries are ruled by despots, by the military or corrupt cliques. All of them closely linked with the West and its global regime and interests.

As they did in several great nations and Empires of South and Central America, as well as Africa, Western invaders and colonizers managed to totally annihilate great Muslim cultures.

What forcefully replaced them were greed, corruption and brutality.

It appears that everything that is based on different, non-Christian foundations is being reduced to dust by the Empire. Only the biggest and toughest cultures are still surviving.

Anytime a Muslim country tries to go back to its essence, to march its own, socialist or socially-oriented way – be it Iran, Egypt, Indonesia, or much more recently Iraq, Libya or Syria – it gets savagely tortured and destroyed.

The will of its people is unceremoniously broken, and democratically expressed choices overthrown.

For decades, Palestine has been denied freedom, as well as its basic human rights. Both Israel and the Empire spit at its right to self-determination. Palestinian people are locked in a ghetto, humiliated, and murdered. Religion is all that some of them have left.

The ‘Arab Spring’ was derailed and terminated almost everywhere, from Egypt to Bahrain, and the old regimes and military are back in power.

Like African people, Muslims are paying terrible price for being born in countries rich in natural resources. But they are also brutalized for having, together with China, the greatest civilization in history, one that outshone all the cultures of the West.

***

Christianity looted and brutalized the world. Islam, with its great Sultans such as Saladin, stood against invaders, defending the great cities of Aleppo and Damascus, Cairo and Jerusalem. But overall, it was more interested in building a great civilization, than in pillaging and wars.

Now hardly anyone in the West knows about Saladin or about the great scientific, artistic or social achievements of the Muslim world. But everybody is ‘well informed’ about ISIS. Of course they know ISIS only as an ‘Islamic extremist group’, not as one of the main Western tools used to destabilize the Middle East.

As ‘France is mourning’ the deaths of the journalists at the offices of the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo (undeniably a terrible crime!), all over Europe it is again Islam which is being depicted as brutal and militant, not the West with its post-Crusade, Christian fundamentalist doctrines that keeps overthrowing and slaughtering all moderate, secular and progressive governments and systems in the Muslim world, leaving Muslim people at the mercy of deranged fanatics.

***

In the last five decades, around 10 million Muslims have been murdered because their countries did not serve the Empire, or did not serve it full-heartedly, or just were in the way. The victims were Indonesians, Iraqis, Algerians, Afghanis, Pakistanis, Iranians, Yemenis, Syrians, Lebanese, Egyptians, and the citizens of Mali, Somalia, Bahrain and many other countries.

The West identified the most horrible monsters, threw billions of dollars at them, armed them, gave them advanced military training, and then let them loose.

The countries that are breeding terrorism, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, are some of the closest allies of the West, and have never been punished for exporting horror all over the Muslim world.

Great social Muslim movements like Hezbollah, which is presently engaged in mortal combat against the ISIS, but which also used to galvanize Lebanon during its fight against the Israeli invasion, are on the “terrorist lists” compiled by the West. It explains a lot, if anybody is willing to pay attention.

Seen from the Middle East, it appears that the West, just as during the crusades, is aiming at the absolute destruction of Muslim countries and the Muslim culture.

As for the Muslim religion, the Empire only accepts the sheepish brands – those that accept extreme capitalism and the dominant global position of the West. The only other tolerable type of Islam is that which is manufactured by the West itself, and by its allies in the Gulf – designated to fight against progress and social justice; the one that is devouring its own people.

 
*Andre Vltchek is a novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. The result is his latest book: “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”. ‘Pluto’ published his discussion with Noam Chomsky: On Western Terrorism. His critically acclaimed political novel Point of No Return is re-edited and available. Oceania is his book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about post-Suharto Indonesia and the market-fundamentalist model is called “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”. His feature documentary, “Rwanda Gambit” is about Rwandan history and the plunder of DR Congo. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and Africa. He can be reached through his website or his Twitter.

source: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/09/who-should-be-blamed-for-muslim-terrorism/

The post The West is Manufacturing Muslim Monsters. Who Should be Blamed for Muslim Terrorism? by ANDRE VLTCHEK appeared first on Void Network.

This event, occurring on the tail end of the Occupy movement, also quickly became the post-facto excuse for extensive federal, state and municipal investigation, surveillance and ongoing repression of political dissent. Several anarchists in the Pacific Northwest were put in prison without charge in the fall of that year, only to be released months later, still with no charges filed. Houses were raided in search of anarchist literature and black hoodies. Up to a year later, people were still being followed.

I was one of the five people originally charged for crimes on May Day 2012[ii]. I’ve since pled guilty to slightly lesser charges, in order to avoid going to trial on two felonies[iii]. I pled in the fall of 2013 and completed the bulk of the sentence in the winter, spending three months in King County’s Work-Education Release (WER) Unit. Technically an “alternative to confinement,” living in WER effectively means that you are imprisoned at all times that you are not allowed out for work, school or treatment (for mental health or drug offenses).

This puts me in a unique position. Since I am one of the few people who has pled guilty to certain crimes from May 1st, 2012, including Riot, I do not necessarily face the same risks in talking about—and defending—the riot as a tactic or the impulses behind it. This by no means makes what I say below an exhaustive or fully representative account of why others may have engaged in that same riot. They mostly got away—a good thing in and of itself, though federal charges may still be pending for one window that was smashed in an empty courthouse. But this also means that they cannot speak of or defend their participation without risking repression.

To be clear: I’m not speaking on behalf of any groups who wound up engaged in the riot that occurred on May Day 2012. To my knowledge, the riot was by no means planned ahead of time, and the anti-capitalist march that the riot grew out of, technically an Occupy Seattle event, was itself planned in public meetings. I’m not even speaking on behalf of this specific riot, but instead on behalf of rioting as such, in the abstract. The question “Why Riot” is not simply: why did you engage in this riot, but, instead, why riot at all? And the perspective given here is that of a rioter.

So I’m writing here for simple reasons: to defend the riot as a general tactic and to explain why one might engage in a riot. By this I mean to defend and explain not just the window breaking, not just “non-injurious violence,” and certainly not just the media spectacle it generates, but the riot itself—that dangerous, ugly word that sounds so basically criminal and which often takes (as in London in 2011) a form so fundamentally unpalatable for civil society that it can only be understood as purely irrational, without any logic, and without possible defense.

I aim, nonetheless, to defend and explain the riot, because we live in a new era of riots. Riots have been increasing in absolute number globally for the past thirty years. They are our immediate future, and this future will spare Seattle no less than Athens or London, Guangzhou or Cairo.

Who am I?

I am a member of the poorest generation since those who came of age during the Great Depression. Born to the “end of history,” we watched the ecstatic growth of the Clinton years morph seamlessly into the New Normal of Bush and Obama.

We have no hope of doing better than our parents did, by almost any measure. We have inherited an economy in secular stagnation, a ruined environment on the verge of collapse, a political system created by and for the wealthy, skyrocketing inequality, and an emotionally devastating, hyper-atomized culture of pyrrhic consumption.

The most recent economic collapse has hit us the hardest. According to a study by the Pew Research Center, the median net worth of people under 35 fell 55 percent between 2005 and 2009, while those over 65 lost only a fraction as much, around 6 percent[iv]. The result is that if you calculate debt alongside income, wealth inequality is today increasingly generational. Those over 65 hold a median net worth of $170,494, an increase from 1984 of 42 percent. Meanwhile, the median net worth of those under 35 has fallen 68 percent over the same period, leaving young people today with a median worth of only $3,662[v].

Despite cultural narratives of laziness and entitlement, this differential is not due to lack of effort or education (my generation is the most educated, as well, and works some of the longest hours for the least pay). The same Pew Study notes that older white Americans have simply been the beneficiaries of good timing. They were raised in an era of cheap housing and education, massive state welfare and unprecedented economic ascent following the creative destruction of two world wars and a depression—wars and crises that they themselves didn’t have to live through.

And the jobs that older Americans hold are not being passed down to us, though their debt is. When they retire, the few remaining secure, living wage and often unionized positions will be eliminated, their components dispersed into three or four different unskilled functions performed by part-time service workers. The entirety of the job growth that has come since the “recovery” began has been in low-wage, temporary or highly precarious jobs, which exist alongside a permanently heightened unemployment rate.

In the long term, this means that, after having been roundly robbed in almost every respect by our parents’ generation, our own future holds nothing more than the hope that we might be employed in two or three separate part-time, no-promotion positions in the few growth sectors, such as healthcare, where we can have the privilege of being paid minimum wage to wipe the asses of the generation that robbed us.
It is no coincidence, then, that every time we hear a fucking baby boomer explain how we’re so entitled, and how they worked summers to pay for college, we contemplate whether or not disemboweling them and selling their organs on the booming black market might be the only way to pay back our student loans.

Where did I come from?

Meanwhile, this economic overhaul has led not only to a global reordering of where things are made, and by whom, but also to a spatial concentration of economic activity in the US.[vi] Those metropolitan regions that were capable of becoming network hubs for global logistics systems fared best, with their amalgamation of hi-tech industries and producer services. These became the urban palaces, with concentrations of “cultural capital” and redesigned downtown cores (lightly cleansed of “undesirable” populations) built to appeal to tourists and foreign dignitaries.
Beyond this, large swaths of the country were simply abandoned as wastelands, where resource extraction was either hyper-mechanized or too expensive, agricultural goods were produced under heavy government subsidy, and small urban centers were forced to compete for the most undesirable jobs in industrial farming, food processing, waste management, warehousing or the growing private prison industry. In many areas, the informal economy expanded enormously—consistent with global trends, most visible in the worldwide growth of slums.

I am from one of these wastelands where the majority of work is informal, the majority of formal industries are dirty or miserable, and where rates of poverty, unemployment, chronic disease, illiteracy, and mental illness are often two to three times the national average. Raised in a trailer several miles off a reservation in one of the poorest counties on the west coast, all of the structural shifts mentioned above were for me not academic abstractions, but living reality. I come from that part of America—the majority of it—where weed is the biggest cash crop, where kids eat Special K like it’s cereal, and where the only “revitalization” we’ve ever seen is when the abandoned factory down the street was converted into a meth lab.
And I was, due mostly to dumb luck, one of the few who was able to earn enough to pay the exit fee. Upon arrival in Seattle, despite having a degree I was fed into the lowest tiers of the labor market. Rather than being some “out-of-town” suburban youth using Seattle as a “playground,” as commentators would claim of the rioters, I was, in fact, one of the multitude of invisible workers that the city depended on—whether hauling goods to and from the port, working in the south county warehouses, cleaning downtown’s sprawling office towers, or, as in my case, working behind the kitchen door.
At the time of the riot, I was working for ten cents more than minimum wage in a wholesale kitchen in South Seattle, where we produced tens of thousands of pre-packaged sandwiches and salads for consumption in upscale city cafés and office buildings. It is not an exaggeration to say that my full-time work schedule (for the duration of Occupy Seattle, which I attended every day after morning shifts at work) amounted to me feeding hundreds of thousands of Seattleites over the several months that Occupy was a present force in the city. It’s likely, then, that those hysteric KIRO-TV commentators claiming that I was part of some “outsider” gang come from the heart of chaos (or Portland, maybe?) to fuck up Seattle have themselves regularly eaten the food that I was paid poverty wages to make.
Despite the language of post-industrial, guilt-free success common to many wealthy Seattleites’ image of themselves, the fact is that Seattle, like any other global city, relies on what is called a dual labor market[vii]. Higher tiers of skilled labor, cultural production, finance and producer services exist atop a secondary tier of less skilled, minimally compensated work in high-turnover jobs with little chance of promotion.
This creates a fundamental spatial problem within capitalism: despite the outsourcing of the dirtiest, most dangerous jobs in manufacturing and resource extraction, the rich can never entirely get away from the poor. The extension of surveillance, incarceration and deportation, the militarization of the police, and the softer counter-insurgency of philanthropy foundations[viii], social justice NGOs, conservative unions and various other poverty pimps are all methods to manage different dimensions of this problem. The riot is what happens when all these mediations fail. And in an era of crisis and austerity, such mediation becomes more and more difficult to maintain.
So in all the media’s talk of “outsiders,” “anarchists” and other terms meant to make the rioting subject opaque to those not immediately engaged in the riot, the one fact that was consistently distorted was the simplest: the thieves in the palace were, in fact, the servants.
I, the terrifying, irrational rioter, am you.

Why don’t I engage in more productive forms of protest?

The other common theme was, of course, the morality play between the “good protestor” and the “bad protestor.” The rioters somehow “infiltrated” the march. They distracted from the “real” issues. They turned “normal” people away from the day’s events, ultimately hurting attempts at reform that were already underway.
There is in this an implicit assumption that there exist “better” forms of protest, and that we rioters do not also do these things. This produces a few small ironies, as when the local alt-weekly, The Stranger, contrasted the negotiated arrest of fast food protestors, who showed their courage by standing their ground and “demanding arrest,” with the May Day rioters, who did nothing but “hide behind bandanas while hurling rocks.” The irony here was that I was myself one of those rioters and one of those fast food workers—having been involved in the fast food campaign from its inauguration, leading a walkout at my workplace in the first strike, planning segments of the intermediate actions (including the wage theft protest, though my pending riot case prevented me from being arrested there), and then briefly taking a paid position with Working Washington for two weeks leading up to the second strike.
Beyond the irony, though, there is the troublesome presumption that this highly negotiated, thoroughly controlled and largely non-threatening activism is somehow more productive in the long term. When I did engage in the fast food strikes, I did so initially as a fast food worker, and the short-term goal there was to build power among food workers in the city. Despite this, no amount of organizing for (often much-needed) reforms can get over the basic problems of reform itself, which is today equivalent to trying to take a step uphill during an avalanche—you may well complete that step, but the ground itself is moving the opposite direction.
What would have been easily achievable, relatively minor reforms in the boom era of fifty or sixty years ago, such as raising the minimum wage to match inflation, enforcing laws against wage theft, and coming up with an equitable tax system, today require herculean effort and mass mobilization, even when ninety percent of the original demand is usually sacrificed simply to show “good faith” at the negotiating table.

Why don’t I like capitalism?

There is plenty more to talk about here—which you can explore if you please. But the basic problem, cut to the size of a tweet, is that the economy is the name for a hostage situation in which the vast majority of the population is made dependent on a small minority through implicit threat of violence.
If we challenge the system’s capacity to infinitely accumulate more at a compounding rate, it goes into crisis—this is basic definition of crisis: when profitable growth slows, stops, or, god forbid, reverses. Whenever this accumulation is challenged, whether by contingent factors such as poor location, or intentional ones, such as a resistant populace, those who hold the power (the wealthy) will start killing hostages.
This is precisely what has been happening over the last fifty years of economic restructuring. Any regions that show significant resistance to the lowering of wages, the dismantling of social services, the export or mechanization of jobs, or the privatization of public property can easily be sacrificed. The American landscape, circa 2014, is littered with just such dead hostages: Detroit and Flint, MI, Camden, NJ, Athens, OH, Jackson, MS, the mining towns of West Virginia or northern Nevada.
The handful of cities (such as New York and Seattle) that were able to escape this fate today pride themselves on being such good hostages. The only reason they were able to survive this rigged game of neoliberal roulette was because of a mixture of sheer geographic luck (often as port cities or pre-existing financial centers) and their absolute openness to do whatever the rich wanted. Public goods were sold off at bargain basement prices, downtown cores were redesigned according to the whims of a few large interests in retail, finance and real estate, and tax money, paired with future tax exemptions, was simply handed out as bribes to big players like Nordstrom and Boeing.[ix]
If we then zoom out to the global scale, it is abundantly obvious that the currently existing economic system—which we call capitalism—is a failed one. If it ever had any grudging utility in raising general livelihoods after its mass sacrifices in war and colonization, that time has unequivocally passed. Aside from the numerous examples cited above, there are a few especially appalling illustrations. Slavery is growing worldwide at a rate higher than at any other time in recent history. Mechanization is set to push massive swaths of workers out of the production process entirely, even while the gains of this increase in productivity are themselves concentrated almost exclusively in the hands of the wealthy. The central role of finance and speculation in the global economy has resulted in massive spikes in global food prices, causing famines and food riots, as well as a situation in which the majority of grain in the world, to take one example, is controlled by just four companies.

Meanwhile, the bulk of the globe’s basic goods production is increasingly concentrated—both in the producer services of high-GDP metropoles like London, New York and Tokyo and in the “world’s factory” of South and Southeast Asia. The production of these goods is not only dominated by vast, low-wage retailers like Wal-Mart and Amazon, but also increasingly dictated by massive contract manufacturers like Foxconn or Yue Yuen, which concentrate their production in factory cities where the lives of migrant workers are surveilled and managed in a quasi-military fashion.
The concentration of the production process coincides with the concentration of the wealth generated by that process. Even within the old “first world,” poverty and unemployment have been on the rise since long before the most recent crisis. Greece and Spain are only the most visible signs of this trend. In the US, especially, the trend splits along racial lines. Cities and schools are resegregating, though the patterns of segregation are more complex than the redlining of the Jim Crow era. One dimension of this resegregation has been the growth of the US prison system into one of the largest the world has ever seen. Even if calculated as a percentage of population, rather than absolute number, the US today imprisons roughly the same fraction of its population as the USSR did at the height of the gulag system—and our prison population is still on the rise.
Curable diseases are returning en masse, while new viruses are being developed at record rates in the evolutionary pressure-cooker of industrial agriculture. Each economic crisis is larger than the one preceding it, and these crises are not just “business cycles.” Or, more accurately: the so-called business cycle is simply a sine wave oscillating around a trajectory of absolute decline. And this decline, like the last major ones in the global economic system, will only be reversible through an unimaginably massive bout of creative destruction.
In the face of a collapsing environment, a hyper-volatile economic system and skyrocketing global inequality, it is simply utopian to believe that the present system can be perpetuated indefinitely without great violence. Opposition to capitalism has become an eminently practical endeavor.

But… Why riot?

Despite all of this, the riot itself may still seem an enigma. On the surface, riots appear to produce little in terms of concrete results and, when you add up the numbers, often do less actual economic damage to large business interests than, for example, blockading the port. They produce a certain spectacle, but so does Jay-Z.
In one sense, there is often a practical side to many riots, which can be far better at winning demands than negotiated attempts at reform. Despite the fact that reform itself is designed to treat symptoms rather than the disease, it’s also evident that riots are a useful tool even in reform efforts. Riots, accompanying illegal blockades, occupations and wildcat strikes, have proliferated in China’s Pearl River Delta over the past several years, and the result has been that workers there have seen an unprecedented rise in manufacturing wages, which more than doubled between 2004 and 2009. Some scholars have called the phenomenon “collective bargaining by riot.”
Similarly, more and more historical work has been emerging showing that riots and other forms of armed organizing were very much the meat of movements like the civil rights struggle in the US, despite the common perception that these things were somehow “non-violent.” It is, in fact, difficult to find any example of a successful, significant sequence of reforms that did not utilize the riot at one point or another. As Paul Gilje, the pre-eminent historian of the US riot, has argued: “Riots have been important mechanisms for change,” and, in fact, “the United States of America was born amid a wave of rioting.” The tactic, then, should by no means be seen as in and of itself exceptional.
And it’s also not a sufficient tactic unto itself. The function of the riot is less about a religious or petulant obsession with the act of breaking shit and also not entirely about winning any given demand. This was apparent in examples like Occupy, which had no coherent, agreed-upon demands, aside from a general rejection of those in power. This demandlessness was a feature not only of Occupy, however, but of nearly every one of the mass movements that began in 2011, starting with the Arab Spring. In each instance, the only thing that was agreed upon was that the system was fundamentally fucked, and it was this aspect alone that transformed the riots from mere attempts at reform into truly historical procedures.
My generation was not only born into the ecstatic “end of history” of the 1990s, but is also the global generation—of slum-dwelling youth and “graduates with no future”—who are inducing the first pangs of history’s rebirth. And this rebirth has taken the figure of the hooded rioter, as has been evidenced by the increasingly frequent transformation of mass riots into occupations of public squares, which themselves evolved into new forms of rioting and, ultimately, the first major insurrection of the 21^st century—which took place in Egypt and has since been largely crushed by the Supreme Council of Armed Forces.
The riot is most important, then, not in its traditional ability to win demands that progressives can only drool over, but instead when it takes on a demandless character. This absence of demands in the riot and occupation implies two things: First, it implies a rejection of existing mediations. We do not intend to vote for fundamentally corrupt political parties or play the rigged game of activism. Though it may be important in particular instances to fight for and win certain demands, such as the demand for $15 an hour, these reforms in and of themselves contribute nothing to the ultimate goal of winning a better world. They can contribute to this project only in very particular contexts, and only when superseded by forms adequate to that true project, as when the growing spate of strikes in Egypt in the years leading up to 2011 was suddenly superseded by a mass insurrection.
Second, it implies the question of power. The riot affirms our power in a profoundly direct way. By “our” power I mean, first, the power of those who have been and are continually fucked-over by the world as it presently is, though these groups by no means all experience this in the same way and to the same degree—the low-wage service workers, the prisoners, the migrant laborers, the indebted, unemployed graduates, the suicidal paper-pushers, the 农民工on the assembly line, the child slaves of Nestle cocoa plantations, my childhood friends who never got out of the trailer or off the rez. But I also mean the power of our generation: the millenials, a label that already implies the apocalyptic ambiance of our era. Or, more colloquially: Generation Fucked, because, well, obviously.
The question of power, though, isn’t simply a question of the devolution of power to the majority of people, though this is the ultimate goal. At the immediate level it is a struggle over power between shrinking fractions of the population dedicated to maintaining the complete shit-show that is the status quo, and growing fractions of the population dedicated to destroying that shit-show as thoroughly as humanly possible, while in the process collectively constructing a system in which poverty becomes impossible, no one is illegal, power itself is not concentrated in the hands of a minority of the population, our metabolism with the natural world bears less and less resemblance to the metabolism of a meth-head scouring the medicine cabinet, and the collective material wealth and accumulated intelligence of the human species is made freely accessible to all members of that species, rather than being reserved as party-swag for half-naked Russian oligarchs.
Pretending that power does not exist directly serves those who presently hold it. And the riot overturns such pretense by exerting our own power against theirs. It is a mechanism whereby we both scare the rich and attract people to a project that goes far beyond the reform of a collapsing world. In this particular instance, it has worked. Many of the fast food workers with whom I organized in the year following the riot understood its portent perfectly well. By May Day 2013, the riot had taken on a life of its own.
The riot, then, is not a hindrance to “real” struggle or a well-intentioned accident where people’s “understandable” anger gets “out of control.” Getting out of control is the point, which is precisely why the riot is the foundation from which any future worth the name must be built.
And we will be the ones to build it. Our generation: the millenials, generation fucked, or, as we’ve taken to calling it: Generation Zero. Zero because we’ve got nothing left except debt—but also nothing to lose. And zero because, like the riot, it all starts here.
In the end, then, you can lose the economics, you can lose the spectacle and the moralizing and the god-awful appeals to cute and fuzzy “social/racial/environmental justice.” Throw all of this in the alembic of the riot, and it boils down to the simplest of propositions:
Our future’s already been looted. It’s time to loot back.

—Phil A. Neel

[i] Note that left-wing political riots primarily target property and, secondarily, engage in defensive violence against the protectors of that property, namely police, security officers, or vigilantes. This has been referred to as “non-injurious” violence, since there is an implicit agreement that rioters not cause harm to innocent bystanders, and since persons are not the primary target of the violence. By contrast, right-wing riots exhibit an opposite aspect, where persons, and particularly the least powerful in a situation, are generally the primary target of the violence, with property destruction being the ancillary. This is a well-documented phenomenon. See, for example: Gilje, Paul A. Rioting in America, Indiana University Press, 1996.
[ii] Of these five cases, one has been dropped after significant expense on the part of the city achieved only a hung jury. Out of all five, there have been only two guilty pleas, mine included.
[iii] It’s worth noting here that striking a police officer in the United States is a felony—which also means that, if you hit a cop and are found guilty of the crime, you lose the right to vote (usually for the duration of your multi-year probation, though in some states, such as Kentucky, you are disenfranchised for the rest of your life).
[iv] Ages 35-44 lost 49%, 45-54 lost 28% and 55-64 lost 14%.
[v] If you calculate the same data for Generation X and the younger Baby Boomers, with the same age brackets used in 1984, you see ages 35-44 losing 44% of their median income, though still holding roughly ten times the wealth ($39,601) as millenials. Ages 45-54 losing 10%, holding a median of $101,651, and ages 55-64 gaining 10%, growing to $162,065. Similarly, since 1967, poverty among the 35-and-under age group has increased from 12% to 22%, while, for those 65 and older, it has actually dropped from 33% to 11%.
[vi] For a more detailed academic account of this process, see Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton University Press, 1991.
[vii] See Michael Piore, Birds of Passage: Migrant Labor and Industrial Societies. Cambridge University Press, 1979
[viii] The philanthropic endeavors of the wealthy are similar to the actions of a burglar who, after robbing a neighborhood, returns to that neighborhood to return half of one percent of the loot as gifts—or, in the case of much international philanthropy, in the form of gift cards that you can only use at the burglar’s own department store, as when the Gates family gives loans earmarked to be used only for the purchase of pharmaceuticals from companies in which the Gates family owns a significant share.
[ix] For a detailed account of this process in Seattle, see: Timothy A. Gibson, Securing the Spectacular City: The Politics of Revitalization and Homelessness in Downtown Seattle. Lexington Books, 2003.

source: http://www.ultra-com.org/project/why-riot/

The post WHY RIOT? — by Phil A. Neel / Ultra magazine appeared first on Void Network.

Unlike Mansoor, I do not think it is in their oversights that Weigel and Ahern deserve a rejoinder. From an anarchist perspective, at least for those of us who read Tiqqun with tremendous interest (without entirely aligning ourselves with some more or less imagined Tiqqunist position), what is striking about them is just how symptomatic their response is—how much it tells without setting out to be much more than a dismissal, a nice excuse not to read, or not to think about what you didn’t really read. (The dismissal is, it’s true, followed by a weak exhortation. But the exhortation feels tacked on and is unlikely to be the reason their piece made the rounds.)

Weigel and Ahern’s reading of Tiqqun reveals to us their political presuppositions and shortcomings; it also pushes us to make our investment in certain positions consonant with Tiqqun’s more explicit. Anarchist conversations can be different if anarchists are willing to read everything more symptomatically—Weigel and Ahern and Tiqqun, yes, but also our own bodies, our own lives. What follows, then, is not an attempt to defend Tiqqun, much less to show the right way to read them, and more of an outline of what I would like to discuss—a sketch of a conversation some of us are learning to have.

To begin, a summary of what is at stake in Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (PM). First, it was included in the first issue of the Tiqqun journal (1999) and then published separately by Mille et une Nuits (2001). Second, there is a clear conceptual linkage between the Theory of Bloom (published in the same issue, and also republished separately) and these Preliminary Materials. Bloom and Young-Girl are figures that appear in both texts (as well as here and there in Tiqqun’s other writings). To enter into this topic I’ll cite an appraisal of Tiqqun for antagonist projects from the recent collection Impasses:

In Theory of Bloom and Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl the critical work proceeds through figures. Bloom and Young-Girl are figures. They are not concepts … they are not demographic designators. They figure social phenomena that emerge in the twentieth century. These social phenomena have to do with forms of experience and subjectivity. When we talk about these in the U.S. way, we usually use the impoverished lexicon of identity politics.

Bloom and Young-Girl are part of what Tiqqun attempted in this journal—to borrow the quaint title of another piece in that issue, a “phenomenology of everyday life.” The aim is to see what is learned if we can describe some aspects of what manifests (what is made to appear) in societies like ours as Bloom, or as Young-Girl. That is what they mean when they write that Young-Girl is a “vision machine” constructed with the aim of “making the [social] battlefield manifest.” The theory of Bloom is developed in a mostly philosophical mode; the materials for the theory of the Young-Girl are gathered as fragments and presented as preliminaries, as if work remains to be done—or must be left incomplete out of some unnamed necessity. I will return to this below. Third, Young-Girl “is obviously not a gendered concept.” I repeat this because it merits repeating; it merits repeating because it has not been understood. Young-Girl, as a figure, allows us to map out and detect ways in which apparatuses of power produce, grasp and model the libidinal sphere in every sense, including those desires which so naturally or culturally seem to cleave into the two-and-then-some of sexual difference or the immediate manyness of genders. Put differently, though the figure is not intended to render a gender visible, it does model something about how gender has come to operate, insofar as gender is a crucial aspect of certain forms-of-life well integrated into societies like ours. Our good liberals and bad radicals enjoy saying that once a sexual or gender identity has been claimed or reclaimed by someone, it is, at least to some extent, free of power relations, of domination.

We counter that the model (explicit for the liberals, implicit for some radicals) for the value of this recognition is and always has been recognition by the state and the granting of legal and moral rights, of new forms of personhood; that, when it is not the legal model, it is the model of creative consumption, in which I believe I am discovering and expressing my true self as I navigate commodity-space; and concurrently that to expand the field of the normal (i.e. more rights, commodities tailored to what I think are my needs) will never amount to the kind of disruptive liberation we anarchists are after. I will return to this matter as well. Fourth, Bloom and Young-Girl are in a complicated relation of partial resonance with a third text published in Tiqqun 2, Sonogram of a Potential. This piece argues for an “ecstatic feminism” along lines I find congruent with my reading of the Bloom/Young-Girl dyad. I will make passing reference to Sonogram, though I do not mean to absorb it entirely into the theoretical space of the first two. Sonogram deserves its own discussion.

Weigel and Ahern make several symptomatic mistakes, or force several misreadings, concerning the least ambiguous aspects of Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl. The first is that, after an initial reference, they refer to the book as Theory of the Young-Girl. But the book is not The, or A, Theory of the Young-Girl. To treat a text that presents itself as preliminaries, outlines, notes, “trash theory”, as a finished product, is to ignore the first and clearest sign its author or authors could give as to how to approach it. This is telling considering the amount of space they devote to inveighing against a supposed irony in PM. It does not seem to me that PM communicates in any single tone, and, if it does, it would be something less ambivalent, such as “hate [of] the Spectacle.” Second mistake: they repeatedly state (and base part of their criticism on the claim) that Tiqqun wrote anonymously. But obviously, Tiqqun did not write anonymously; they wrote in and as Tiqqun. (Inability to distinguish between true anonymity and the use of pseudonyms, heteronyms, shared names such as Tiqqun, and multiple-use names (e.g. Luther Blissett) suggests, again, willful ignorance of the most obvious clues to interpretation.) Weigel and Ahern not only assimilate pseudonymous to anonymous writing, but more strikingly claim that here such practices “abet sexism” (note legalistic language). Mansoor responds appropriately on this point, arguing that pseudonymity and non-attribution of sources are in fact “an attack on the politics of textual propriety, the law of the copyright and of the father.” To which an anarchist might add that it is no surprise that our academics insist on identification of authors and citation of sources, and that we like to write, read, and discuss writing that refuses that insistence.

Weigel and Ahern get one thing quite right: Young-Girl is a figure. But they immediately botch their response by assimilating the figural to the real, as if Young-Girl were an idea, a concept, of actually existing young girls. They are like those who read Anti-Oedipus and get confused or offended when they “realize” that Deleuze and Guattari think psychotics should be shuffled into the place of the revolutionary subject. Or like those who read Nietzsche on the overman and think it is an argument for a genetic homo superior. (To someone who responds to PM by asking “Wait a minute, how has all the concreteness of the world taken refuge in my ass?”, one might well answer: “Wait a minute, why are you so comfortably identifying with a figure of hyperconsumption?”) What does it mean, then, that Weigel and Ahern fail to mind the dash and so miss what is figural about the figure? It means that they are able to read obtusely, “ontically”, as Nina Power puts it, whenever they need to make the claim that there is sexism or misogyny afoot in PM. The figure loses all of its diagnostic and critical power when it is grasped so crudely. It is not a theory of young girls we are talking about here, so why read it all as though it is about girls or women? It is a satire, in some sense, but not a satire of or about women or girls. It is a satire, or really a détournement with dark satirical effects, about gender and power, about how power works through gender (not just as sexism), about how we cling to gender and so to the power that works through gender. Ariana Reines wrote a fascinating set of notes on her work on PM. Her opinion:

I’d like to point out for the Anglophone reader that although the introduction asserts that the “Young-Girl is evidently not a gendered concept,” and that the term is applicable to young people, gays, and immigrants, French is a gendered language; and that, moreover, the genderedness of French is not the only way to account for the fact that this book, as it accumulates, does become—in some sections more than others—a book about women. With everything biological and constructed the term women signifies. A book about us. It contains passages rife with heterosexist ressentiment and, occasionally, whiffs of (what seemed to me to be) female intellectual rage against the more vapid and conformist members of our sex.

Reines puts her finger on the risk that PM runs, the risk, precisely, of a response like Weigel and Ahern’s: the accusation of garden-variety sexism, or, worse, extreme misogyny. No, it is not a side effect of the French language; it had to run this risk to make its point. No, the possible “female intellectual” did not have to out and name herself to keep the text safe from such accusations; it would have botched precisely what makes it work. (“Tiqqun claims it has lady members…” write Weigel and Ahern. Identify yourselves for proper textual/political evaluation.)

A remark about what makes it work: the reason, I would suggest, that the book is called Preliminary Materials is that so much of it is a collection of détourned texts. (Reines: “You should know that when a passage in the text sounds like a women’s magazine, that’s because it comes from a women’s magazine”). Now, the practice of détournement was conceived by the Situationists out of desperation, as they were seeking to abolish (among other things) art as a separated sphere of life. Their analysis was that any new creation (painting, film) would either prefigure, or simply work as raw material for, future commodification—if it did not already and inescapably bear the commodity form. As a response they attempted creations composed of repurposed images or fragments, whose contrast and conflict would not just represent but enact the negativity they felt towards the world. “This combination of parody and seriousness reflects the contradictions of an era in which we find ourselves confronted with both the urgent necessity and the near impossibility of initiating and carrying out a totally innovative collective action” (Situationist International #3, 1959). That is why Weigel and Ahern are wrong to simply describe this part (most) of PM as “Situationist-ish collage.” A collage suggests a fanciful assemblage of images that go well together, like a grade school assignment to make a poster showing what you want to be when you grow up, which assumes the images of your prospective adulthood are already there, waiting for you to shop among them and creatively recombine them. Détournement, however, is primarily negative—it concerns what cannot be said, shown, or felt except by glaring, sometimes violent contrast of text and image. It shows or says that what you want to show or say can’t be shown or said—its negativity arises from the feeling that life is impossible, that you have no way of being who or what you want to be.

So if and to whatever extent this book seems to be about girls or women, those girls or women are to be understood, I would say, along the lines of such a negativity. A future theory of the Young-Girl must pass through the negative reference to woman, girl, femininity, femaleness, all of that, because it follows the articulations and investments of power apparatuses in societies like ours. “The ‘youth’ and ‘femininity’ of the Young-Girl, in fact her youthitude and femininitude, are that through which the control of appearances extends to the discipline of bodies” (PM). Reines’ other main point: sustained work with the text produced in her a disturbing somatization. “I mean it gave me migraines, made me puke; I couldn’t sleep at night, regressed into totally out-of-character sexual behavior.” I imagine this is because it produces its effects precisely by rubbing the most disgusting aspects of our culture of consumption and recuperation in your face—not just citations of sexism or misogyny but terrible evidence of your participation in them, the way that you are capable of embodying the Young-Girl. (Reines’ nausea as a symptom of the unnamed necessity that leaves the materials in a preliminary form.) That is the darkness of its satirical effects, the negativity at work in its détournement.

That said, one could go too far in thinking that the reference to girls or women is all there is to the figure. Does this not also become a book about young people? Yes, because the apparatuses also invest the “youth” of the young, the citizens and consumers of the future, and the unlucky faces of every perverse desire of the now. Why do Weigel and Ahern not discuss the Young- component of Young-Girl? The short answer is that they have a target in mind: the Man-Child (note that, since man-child is hyphenated in ordinary use, this expression elides whether or not it is a figure, the Man-Child, or just man-children here and there who are under discussion—precisely their confusion about the figure of the Young-Girl). To make their point, they must treat PM as an off-balance, sexist critique that requires its balancing answer. Mansour detects the imaginary of equality at work here, and aptly intervenes:

[They] rely on a brand of feminism that takes symmetry for “fairness,” “equity” for “equality,” as though those were not already part of the metrics on which our contemporary social relations are founded. … We are supposed to find our place, as good citizens, in the immense system of equivalence posing as equality. […]
What we need is not a program, especially one of equality when equality in the face of the uneven history, of women under patriarchy and capitalism, has served to subjugate us ever more under false promises of wealth and legal juridical recognition.

Here we could also listen to Sonogram:

There is no equality possible between men and women, nor between men and men or women and women. The smooth surface of abstract arithmetic that forms the basis for the illusion of democracy constantly cracks under the obvious weight of irreducible ethical differences, under the arbitrary nature of elective affinities, under the suspicion that the circulation of power is a question of qualities that become incarnate, that power passes through bodies.

All of which is to say that, while Weigel and Ahern state that Tiqqun’s theory “is at the tail end of a radical tradition that has largely exhausted its usefulness,” we might notice that Tiqqun, in PM and especially Sonogram, set out from an exhaustion or impasse within feminism. The latter text strongly modifies the term with the adjective ecstatic in view of that impasse, while the former bluntly states: “The triumph of the Young-Girl originates in the failure of feminism.” According to Tiqqun, the more liberal forms of feminism were easily absorbed into social institutions whose basic coercive function was not altered, whereas the more autonomist and radical forms faced the same sociocultural counteroffensive as the entirety of the revolutionary Left (in this sense it is instructive to read Tiqqun’s two histories of the Italian 70s, This is Not a Program and Sonogram, side by side). I’ll briefly add that the attention-grabbing complement to Weigel and Ahern’s (as Mansoor rightly puts it) brand of feminism, the conceit of the Man-Child, is, as a joke, a dud; as criticism, it is limited to the narrow range of dudes in humanities graduate programs (who may well be neurotic and annoying, but aren’t especially the locus of power in a society like ours). What is worst about this preconceived target, and the sloppy reading of PM that Weigel and Ahern seem to need to pass through to get there, is that “his” irony allows them to misconstrue the practice of détournement in PM, which would otherwise have been an obstacle to their literal, ontic reading. And it is in this reading and its easily “actionable” object (the desideratum of “fairness” feminism, which always knows how to act once it finds the inequality to be equalized) that the mild popularity of Weigel and Ahern’s piece lies. Who cares what some obscure group had to say about capitalism and identity? It is complicated and difficult reading. It is easier to denounce man-children—who, let me be perfectly clear, I have no intention of defending.
But some of us anarchists would rather understand what the obscure group had to say about capitalism and processes of identification, even and especially if it troubles such moral and political commonplaces as fairness and equality; even and especially if it risks the thought of the failure of feminism so as to learn a different kind of lesson from its history. Back to the figural, then. The anonymous commentator in Impasses underlines that Bloom and Young-Girl have a mutual source. “For the Young-Girl as for all other Blooms, the craving for entertainment is rooted in anguish” (PM). But Blooms sometimes resist, and part of that resistance may be to write their own theory (said theory is still “of Bloom” in the other sense of the genitive); Young-Girls, by comparison, do not resist; they consume and express themselves, they seduce and are seduced, and so their theory never comes together.

For example, Bloom figures a crisis of sexuation, and Young-Girl figures the hypersexuality that is offered as the resolution to that crisis. Asexuals versus the pornosphere… It is in this sense that the figure of the Young-Girl is a diagnostic and critical tool. Its aim is not to represent or replicate a reality whose banalities (including the banality of everyday misogyny) some of us know all too well. Its aim is to allow us to understand the deployment of a particular kind of apparatus that invests the seemingly natural or culturally familiar categories of age and gender as counter-measures to the potential for social disavowal named Bloom. “Young-Girls constitute the most lethal commando THEY have ever maneuvered against heterogeneity, against every hint of desertion” (PM). We begin by cleaving society, along psycho-political lines, into those that resist, flee, or are at least capable of it, and those that do not. We note that the former can become part of the latter; and we note that the categories of age and gender are deployed selectively, qualitatively, as part of that operation.

Two provisional conclusions. First: to discuss the figure of Young-Girl as Weigel and Ahern do—not only ontically, but also apart from its relation to Bloom—is to miss precisely what an antagonist might find useful in it. The writer in Impasses observes that Bloom is a figure of anomie, of anyone’s disinvestment in society and social norms and bonds. This happens first as a seeming alienation, an implosion of the self’s reality:

… Bloom correspond[s] to a sense of being unreal without trusting the path offered back to the real. A first approach to the Young-Girl is to grasp that it is the figure of someone who abandons that sense of unreality in favor of what THEY offer as the path back to the real. Overall this is to be understood as an effect of power, a re-binding to the social real.

This is the Young-Girl as “offensive neutralization apparatus,” according to PM. It is aimed not at everyone, but specifically at Blooms, at what is Bloom in anyone and everyone. “If Bloom’s desire reveals no ultimate truths about oppression or freedom, it does on the other hand permit or prohibit desubjectivation; it increases or diminishes collective potential” (Sonogram). If Bloom is the refusal, sometimes the impossibility of work, look in what company the Young-Girl appears, according to This is Not a Program:

… work also has a more directly militaristic function, which is to subsidize a whole series of forms-of-life-managers, security guards, cops, professors, hipsters, Young-Girls, etc.—all of which are, to say the least, anti­-ecstatic if not anti-insurrectional.

The anon in Impasses comments:

With the figure of Young-Girl we name the two principal contemporary forms of reintegration: identity and consumption as lifestyle. In their closely connected functioning, as identification with the Spectacle, the fundamental ambiguity of Bloom is betrayed, and the plans for exit are botched. The Young-Girl, Tiqqun say, is a model citizen; here citizenship is redefined as an explicit response to the threat of Bloom’s indifference to society.

The apparatus produces the phenomena that are found and figured as Young-Girl. Both aspects, Young- and -Girl, are vectors of commodification and reintegration, working together to generate permanent instability. Gender is part of the operation, but not gender alone. Age may undermine gender, and gender may undermine age. By this I mean that Young-Girl indicates the spurious empowerment of (some) women and (some) youth in societies like ours (the Spectacle’s “praise of femininity” (PM)), and at the same time the way that no position or identity thusly empowered is ever safe or stable. The paths to reintegration may almost always be described as modes of consumption: for young people, to consume what will make them pass as belonging to a world to which they are not yet fully adjusted (making them either mock adults or participants in subcultural pseudo/practice worlds); for women, to consume what will show their proper integration into society (as either an “equal” to men or belonging to a recognizable and recognized political protest ideology or grouping). “Blending into a fatal and complacent intimacy with things has become the mass activity for fetish-compatible Blooms” (Sonogram). The most criminalized, the most persecuted, the most vulnerable in all these games of power are precisely those who do not or can not be reintegrated, because they do not or can not participate in the necessary kind of consumption. Though we may have to fake it for the sake of survival.

Second provisional conclusion: to clearly distinguish between a moralistic, rights-and-recognition based, pro-identification politics and our anti-political alternative would be to rearticulate what is on the lips of so many people, especially young people, these days: that it is not only for seeming to belong to the wrong group that one is put down, shut out, yelled at, chased, beaten, and murdered, but especially for not seeming to belong to any group at all. So say those who today call themselves genderqueer or gender-nonconforming or other phrases that denote not identities but gaps between identities. So say those who for one reason or another are considered less than citizens of the Nation and bad subjects of (normal or other than normal) Sexuality. So say those for whom life in public and in private is lived as an interminable series of sex tests, gender tests, pleasure tests, body tests. One position would ask those of us who feel this way to answer the test questions, to settle on an identity, a name, a social zone, a project of seeking recognition and rights, and to wait for the crumbs to be handed out. Our anti-politics asks what there is left to do to live however we can and however we like, pushing aside every attempt to commodify the way we wear our outsiderness…

The tension is clear. Bloom is the figure of those who escape from identification—their potential rebelliousness, fragility, insanity, dangerousness, and so on. Young-Girl is the figure of those recaptured by identification in a process that makes identification seem liberatory insofar as it appears as their own and not imposed on them. “Reappropriating difference, which meanwhile has become biopower’s primary management tool, is obviously a lost cause” (Sonogram). And if age and gender are at work in this apparatus then what is at stake for us is, indeed, the question of gender. It is also what is glossed over by Weigel and Ahern: the question of youth. Like Mansoor, we are stridently anticapitalist and thus we respond differently to Tiqqun’s critique of social life in societies like ours than Weigel and Ahern. Far from a project of seeking equality or rights, we are driven to observe that almost any affirmation of gender—as natural, as socially constructed, as culturally specific, etc.—may be absorbed by the Young-Girl operation. That does not mean that any given one is or has been; but we are brought to admit that we need ethical criteria where none are to be found. Which is why some of us have been trying to elaborate more clearly (which may simply mean: practically) what the abolition of gender means. And though no one is speaking about the abolition of age, there is also an implicit negativity in our conversations towards the very path of life as it is set out for us. People used to, perhaps still do, talk about the liberation of youth.

Some of that is relevant here; but really the issue is that the age category itself makes increasingly less sense to those who have no discernible path to a stable adulthood, and those for whom adulthood can only be envisioned as a “comfortable” slow-motion implosion, for all of us torn from any acquaintance with a biological progression in our own bodies that is not also an awareness of the movement, pulse, gestures of power.

None of this is to say that what are clearly marked as Preliminary Materials for a Theory that, almost fifteen years later, has yet to appear, are sacrosanct or sufficient for an understanding of this tension, this terrain, this power. But it is to say that those who set out to criticize Tiqqun’s text without acknowledging such matters, or chalking them up to the rhetorical hyperbole of radical theory, are assuming precisely the normalcies and normativities that anarchists of our Tiqqun-reading stripe are out to destroy. “Because the only honorable departure from a minority status is not the achievement of recognition by the dominating majority or a change in force relations, but the deconstruction of the whole mechanism of recognition itself and of the idea of victory” (Sonogram). “A communization of bodies is to be expected” (PM).

source:
http://anarchistnews.org/content/mind-dash

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In his “Cool Memories” on America, the French writer Jean Baudrillard discusses through his anectodes some of the problems that contemporary societies of mass consumption are facing: In an endless schema of frustration/gratification, is human desire kidnapped and turned into a hostage without exchange? Aren’t we sacrificing something through the model of affluent society in which we are trapped in a vicious cycle of coping up with the others? Isn’t our obsession to compare our desires with those of the others reducing the ambivalent character of it to a “natural” and “naked” state so that our only pleasure resides in the act of watching? Isn’t this commensurate spectacle leading to the impoverishment of the ambivalent character of human desire? Or better, is ambivalent symbolism itself becoming a parody through the system of signs of social standing as an only way of existing in the society? Are the orgies, feasts, potlatches, in short, ecstatic states of mind where the people could forget their self consciousness and transgress the limits of reason in order to be a part of the other, becoming a simple pornography, a simulacrum, a hyperreality, a reality more real than real? Are our irrational passions continously captured and programmed into a hyperrational order? Are we living in a permanent state of surveilled dream?

The first aim of this presentation is to try to investigate the philosophical origins of our obssession to “discover” the human desire and to “colonize” it by turning it into “needs” and “wants”. Secondly, I will try to discuss how these “discoveries” and their utilization in their attempt to “educate” people are implicated in the modern societies. Last but not least, I will try to question the “success” of these implications in the process of disciplining the behavior of the consumer and shape the discipline of “consumer behavior”. Can we get a “well behaving” function of consumer behavior and does the consumer behave “well” as presupposed by the consumer researchers and mass-media?

PHILOSOPHICAL ORIGINS OF SUBJUGATED DESIRE

The colonization of passion by reason finds its philosophical origins in Socrates and Plato. Pre-Socratic mythological thought is a game of passions, emotions, imaginations, as well as a system of measured reason. Aesthetics and Ethics are not universalized in mythological Pantheon: each of the Gods and demi-Gods represent a part of the excellence and the weakness of human existence trying to find its way through the misty aura of the cosmos. Mythology is a magical dramatization of everyday events, it represents the imaginative appeal of instantenous, miraculous and capricious rythm and harmony of the cosmos (Beckman 1979; Richard 1982).

According to Socrates and his succesors, virtue is obedience to reason considered as the right use of the mind. Passion distorts reasoning; it is evil. The mind free from passions is a citadel- a refuge for men who desire. Desire must be subjected to reason:

“Wipe out imagination; check desire; extinguish appetite; keep the ruling faculty in its own power” (Marcus Aurelius in Dawson 1924, pp: 86)

Good man puts himself under the control of intellectual reasoning. The source of all the evil is ignorance. Whoever commits error in the choice of pleasure and pain -that is, good and evil- commits it through the lack of knowledge; knowledge of what eternally exists: science. Science is the basic of ethics because it searches for the divine order of what really exists. The opinions are immoral because they deal with the changing facts, appearances. Facts are not true in themselves, they must be refered to the harmony, which is the mathesis, the order of orders. We can reach scientific knowledge by the education of desire; by the subjugation of desire to the disinterested,and sublimated knowledge in search of eternal truth (Cristaudo 1991).

The real object of science is knowing the necessities which are indexed in the universal order. Logical intelligence is the faculty of thinking the necessities in terms of universal harmony. It is the guide which illuminates our everyday life distorted by passions. The right and duty of the citizens is to know the necessities of every day life, production and consumption, that is, the universal law and order of existence. And one should always keep in mind the “real” necessities during the consumption act (Ostenfeld 1987, Dawson 1924):

“In things that concern the body accept only so far as the bare need -as in food, drink, clothing, habitation, servants (!). But all that makes for glory or luxury thou must utterly proscribe” (Socrates, Encheiridon xxxiii, in Dawson 1924, pp: 64)

In his famous trial, Socrates was accused, by Alcibiades, of being hypocrite by means of an excellent mastering of words in order to justify his passions. Maybe he was right when we consider Socrates’ interest in “servants” as a bare need !

Passing through canonical monotheistic religions, subjugation of passion to reason finds its ultimate expression in Cartesian thought. According to Descartes, nature is a pre-set divine order and god gave us the reason as an instrument of understanding it for the general interest of the mankind. Freedom is the understanding of the divine order of things; the will must follow this order. The more one is inclined toward natural order, the more free he is (Cristaudo 1991).

Nevertheless, man is not only a rationally thinking being; he is an animal machine who lives without the permission of thought. Our passions are generated not from our opinions but from the involuntary movements of human body. They are not good or bad in themselves, but a part of human nature. Hence, desire must be recognized as need in order to be under the control of the reason to promote the general welfare of the mankind.

Another tendency of modern rationalism is represented by Friedrich Hegel (Grumley 1989). According to Hegel, nature itself is a self-realizing consciousness. It is a moment in the accomplishment of the absolute reason- Spirit. In this sense, consciousness of the individual can not realize itself through the knowledge of existing natural facts which themselves are the alienated singular moments of Universal Spirit. Freedom is not only knowing the necessities but also changing them toward the self-realization of the finality of the History.

Hegel (Richard 1980) considers desire as the motivation for passion; the opposite of Spirit. Passion is the particular, multiple, it does not envisage the unity but diversity. Desire ties the man to his body by detouring him from the search of absolute knowledge which should be his real aim. Desire opposes the will to realize the universal reason because it is determined by particular needs. Passion is a “pathos”, a sufferance which turns life into destiny instead of driving the subject to the quest of freedom.

THE SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE RATIONAL MODERNITY

The extension of these two tendencies of modernity in terms of social and economic explanations of human behavior manifests itself in utilitarian (Cartesian) and Marxist (Hegelian) theories. For the first one, human being is a rational being with unlimited needs and wants who has to act in an environment determined by scarce resources. Although needs and wants are unlimited, they are not ambivalent: they are commensurate according to the different levels of utility gained from their satisfaction.

Thus, freedom is full information of what is available; at what cost; and the ability to compare different levels of utility which would be obtained from the satisfaction of wants. Individual has a preference, he knows what he wants; he is capable of consistently ordering his wants from most prefered to less preferred; and he will choose from within this ordering in such a way to maximize his satisfaction (Bohm-Bawerk 1949, McKenzie 1976).

Talcott Parsons (Parsons 1964) extends the utilitarian theory to a social system basis. According to Parsons, the motivation for human behavior is not the pure self-interest. Economic rationality is not a psychological generalization but a value system appropriate to the social system. The goal of the economy is not simply the production of income of an aggregate of individuals. Besides, the reproduction of the social system as a complex whole of institutionalized value patterns is the essential mechanism of the social system. The first functional imperative of the social system is to maintain the integrity of that value system and its institutionalization. In this sense, households, universities, units of government, churches etc., are in the economy (Parsons 1956).

Freud introduces a new dimension to the concept of desire as a motivating force of human activities: the satisfaction of primary needs such as food, shelter, clothing, etc., is more or less immediate. Desire realizes itself and consumes its realization spontaneously. Nevertheless, this is not true for sexual instinct (libido). Desire stays latent in the unconscious because of the repression of the immediate consumption. This causes a state of frustration and the missing object of desire is replaced by symbolic objects. Desire, which is sexual in nature, transforms itself into a need for these objects. The “pleasure principle” replaces itself with the reality principle: man learns to give up momentary, uncertain, frustrating pleasure for delayed, restrained but “assured” pleasure (Marcuse 1966, Freud 1970).

The discourse on consumption shifts its axis from the principle of “lack” to the principle of “abundance” during the post-second world war period: The organization of the society becomes so complex that the “homo economicus” can no more decide on what is “good” and what is “bad” without the help of educators. This is a dangerous affair however: who would decide about the “realness”, “essentiality” of the needs which the consumer is not aware of? There comes our old friend “science” who is accustommed to operate always together with the morality since Socrates. It seems that science and morality are not satisfied by the colonization of the nature outside the “human subject”, now they are here for the discovery of what is inside the man. Motivation research was their first galley in their conquest of the dark waters of the non-rational and they are finding more and more complex vehicles. “Conquistodares” continue to colonize the world and their missionary is the mass media.

Of course some old fashioned moralists did not wait to criticize this situation: the motivational analyst and symbol manipulator pooling their talents and millions of dollars at their disposal, were making a fascinating and at times disturbing team. They were shaping the minds by using the occult influences (Packard 1957).

Ernest Dichter comforts: there is nothing to be afraid of. Motivation research is only in the quest of human behavior. Human desire is the raw material it is working with. Human progress is a conquest of the animal within us. The strategy of human desire is the tool of shaping the human factor. No conquest is possible without strategy !

Human behavior can not be explained merely by the rational, conscious acts. Our daily decisions are governed by motivations over which we have no control and of which we are often quite unaware. Modern communication makes the use of emotional appeals in addition to rational ones in order to sway people. Very few products have purely utilitarian aspects. Motivation research only helps us to achieve a number of deeper psychological goals. Why should we try to repress them? What we need is a new freedom – the freedom to think in new channels. Motivational research is the application of social science techniques to the problems of human motivation (Dichter 1960).

The Hegelian extension of modernity as a socio-economic system manifests itself in Marxism. According to Marxism, classical and neo-classical economic theories reflect an alienated reality. The concepts of utility and exchange value which are taken for granted by these economists are in fact historically determined and socio-economic processes. The scientific method can not restrict itself only to the understanding of the immediate reality but has to operate in order to change it towards the laws of motion of the history.

According to Marxists (Mandel 1969), man is estranged to nature through his act of production. In primitive societies where the division of labor is not developed, men produce use values for their immediate satisfaction. Nevertheless, with the development of division of labor, men begin to produce commodities for exchange. Exchange value becomes a mediator between man and man whereas use value is the mediator between man and nature. This process of objectification turns into a process of alienation; man becomes alienated to the product of his labor.

Total alienation occurs with the generalized commodity production, where the private property of means of production deprives the laborer from his direct labor act. Concrete labor becomes subjugated to the exchange value, the abstract quantity of social labor. This subjugation implies the commodification of labor as labor power. Alienated labor becomes the only mediator for social exchange. Society loses the control of social relations created by itself. Commodity fetishism occults the market relations as a product of human activities and makes people believe that the laws of market are natural laws. During this process of production for pure exchange, the capitalist speculates on creating a new need in another so as to drive him to a fresh sacrifice, to place new independence:

“Subjectively, the extension of products and needs becomes a contriving and overcalculating subservience to inhuman, sophisticated, unnatural and imaginary appetites”.(Marx cited in Mandel 1973 pp: 36)

The only possibility of overcoming this distorted reality is the action of historical subject armed with critique.

Criticism has its origins in Post-Socratic philosophy as its cousin positivism. It is the art of explaining the phenomena which are “veiled” by images, appearances. Considered as one of the essential activities of reason, critique opens the way for the rational subject through all spheres of life to make them accessible. In monotheistic religions, it is a way of interpreting the “signs” in order to justify the supremacy of the “word”, “scripture”, “the holy book”.

In this context, critique is the instrument of reason to reflect on the “objectivity” of the objects of experience. On the other hand, dialectical critique distinguishes itself from the metaphysical critique in the sense that it aims to change the conditions of what is considered to be false or distorted consciousness. It claims to render transparent what had been previously hidden in order to initiate a process of self-reflection to achieve a liberation from the dominations of past constraints.

In its vulgar forms, marxist critique observes the liberation from the alienation in ex-socialist countries (alas !). In these countries working class is not alienated to its labor because the private property of the means of production is abolished. Socialist state takes care of the “essential needs” (i.e. use value) and socialist man does not have “inhuman”, “sophisticated”, “unnatural”, and “imaginary” appetites. Working individual in socialist countries is not alienated to his products; he constructs socialism through his production act: he is a “labor hero”, a new man, who realizes his “unalienated desire” in making of history. Each magnificient dam built, each sputnik sent to space, each olympic medal won by an athlete belongs to the victory of the socialism in which each individual is involved as an organic member.

More subtle approaches of critical theory are represented by the Frankfurt School. Adorno and Horkheimer claim the replacement of practical reason by instrumental reason as a result of the developments in culture industry. The alienation caused by the commodity fetishism infiltrates into the consciousness of the working class through the commodification of culture by the leisure market. Since then the self realization of working class through its “praxis”, its practice of labor to transform the world becomes a part of instrumental reason. Although the classes exist, there is no more possibility for class consciousness for working class. Public invades private, private invades public. It becomes difficult to make a distinction between the external suggestion and internal desire. The main principle of domination becomes manipulation of desire instead of repression. Hence, instrumental reason forms an impersonal system which becomes independent from all the members of the society, including those in the ruling positions. Either bourgeoisie or working class lose their position as subjects but turn into objects dominated by the technical rationality. Adorno and Horkheimer try to recover rational subject by means of a “negative dialectics”, a criticism of commodified objects according to a sublimated art (Bottomore 1984).

Even in this subtle approach of Adorno and Horkheimer, reason as the realization of the universal ideals continues to colonize everyday life. Furthermore, they seem to share the same ideals with the “consumer researchers”, in the sense of “educating” and “informing” people about their “true needs”. They form a harmonious couple after all, where human boredom needs exigently self-cannibalizing novelties: critique and interpretation revolutionizes, consumer research rationalizes.

TOWARD A PROGRAMMED SOCIETY?

One of the first resistances to the reason oriented universalist modernity comes from Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche accuses Socrates of reducing philosophy to a discourse which tries to regulate passion for will to live into a unique, universal reality. Philosophy becomes serious , logical, clear and demonstrative with Socrates. Reason analyzes, dissects, systematizes, makes rigid what is hidden in deep. Nevertheless, interior life of man is an act of ambivalent passion rather than being an act of cold objective rationality. Desire is rooted in the life which gives us the will to live. It is the passion to exist. In this sense, it is not possible to rigidize it into the tracks of rationality. To live in harmony with cosmos does not mean to follow the tracks of an assumed universe but to feel the rythmes and pulses of the life. Thus, desire opposes knowledge when it does not accord with life. Desire is pathetique; in the sense of both suffering and sharing. It is the aspiration to deepen the life in our singularity and to be in accord with the flow of the cosmos (Deleuze 1983, Richard 1980).

Georges Bataille (Bataille 1985) pushes further Nietzsche’s arguments. Bataille claims that rationalistic realism invades all domains of life with the development of modernity. Endless quest of reson to appropriate external forms into an organized system of words causes the impoverishment of human imagination: words order,but images evoke symbols. What strikes human eyes determines not only the knowledge of relations between various objects, but also a given and decisive state of mind. Therefore, it is not the rational signification of the symbols which make them important for human existence, but their irrational ambivalence.

Following this reasoning, Bataille points out that the rationalization of the human desire as necessities and regulating it in terms of a rational utility frame would be repressing it in order to maintain a certain order which is hypocritical and unjust. How can material utility be the main task of life, Bataille asks, since it is limited to the reproduction and conservation of whatever exists? Man is not only a calculating machine whose goal is to realize benefits, but also an emotional being which realizes itself in the symbolic sacrifice. Sacrifice is a mythical delirium from all selfish calculation and reserve. It signifies an ecstatic exit from the self, a desire to put one’s body and mind entirely in a more or less violent state of expulsion. Sacrificial consumption is the elementary form of orgy, which has no other goal than the incorporation of irreducibly heterogenous elements (Bataille 1985).

Jean Baudrillard (Baudrillard 1970; 1983; 1990) develops similar arguments concerning symbolic exchange. In today’s consumption societies symbolic exchange becomes a parody under system of signs of social standing. What we consume in consumption societies is the meaning of the signs. The signs transmitted by the mass media do not signify a meaning in themselves, but mobilize the collective imaginary to give them a signification. When everybody agrees on the meaning of the sign then it is consumed (consumated). Mass media is an infinite generator of signs without signification. Thus, the main principle of consumer society becomes non- difference through difference, normality through competition.

Mass psychology provokes the people to have what others do not have, but since everybody is doing the same thing, there begins a competition for the “ultimate model”. When everybody has it then it is no more “ultimate” but “obsolete”. Contrary to the puritan rationalism where the “model” is more or less stable, today’s hyperrationalism has to consume its “model” in order to maintain its operation. Planned motivation takes the place of moral responsibility and extends the puritan morality to a hedonistic morality of self-fulfilment. The feeling of guilt after transgression replaces itself with the rationalization: in order to be normal, you have to change- you have to cope with others.

Language of the consumption society is the most impoverished of languages: full of signification and empty of meaning. This empty space is filled by the consumer researchers who always find and operationalize new motivations to replace the obsolete ones. There is no more fixed “human nature” or a referent for marketing. Unlike the modern establishment, there is no more a discourse of reality which serves as a fixed referent in the post- modernity; it is replaced by its simulacra. Social sciences invent new realities when the old ones are obsolete and diffuse them through mass- media: the invented reality becomes real through simulation; a reality more real than real; a hyperreality. In the simulative church where the researchers are the priests and the “deep motives” diffused by the media are the preachings, the masses depend on the mood of the consumer: they do not repress, they do not manipulate, but simply seduce the desire in order to turn it into new tracks of sign.

Thus, the system of consumption society does not reproduce itself according to total order and to the principle of production. Programmed chaos and “catastrophe” becomes the main principle of the system: the system must destroy its order in order to maintain the order. The main principle of this system cannot be power, because power produces the real, it perceives itself as real, immortal, eternal (with the aid of the theories which analyze it, even to criticize it.) Seduction is stronger than power: because it does not need a fixed reference; it is a reversible and mortal process.

Every body is not as pessimist as Baudrillard. According to Michel de Certeau (de Certeau 1984), most of the analyses of the consumer culture are concerned with the representations produced by an ordered system on the one hand, and the modes of consumer behavior adapting to these representations on the other hand. However, these analyses do not take into account what cultural consumer “makes” or “does” during this process of consumption and with the images represented to him/her.

Although de Certeau agrees with the theories of colonization of every aspect of life by systems of production, he goes further and observes a silent, non-violent resistance which survives in the domain of consumption. As the indigenous indians of South America under Spanish colonizers, who did not resist Christian missionaries but simply adopted the signs of Christianity and subverted them according to their own culture, today’s consumers use and transform the meanings of the “products” which are imposed to them. The preachers, educators, popularizers of production may present and diffuse the “technologies” of “how to use” the signs- that is all they can do. They can not control the users since they do not resist and seem to accept these rules. They can act as engineers of the social mind, but this does not necessarily mean that they can fragment and construct it. The masses follow a different way of thinking which is too fugitive and ambivalent to be shaped by the strategies of the managers of the mind (de Certeau 1984).

Michel Maffesoli observes the renaissance of the mythological ecology in the post-modern object. Post-modern ethos does not constitute itself according to a historical project, but in a reappropriated nature, within a shared space, collective participation to the world of objects. We are witnessing a naturalization of culture and culturization of nature through post-modernity. Objects invade spirituality and spirituality invades the world of objects. Our megalopoles become jungles where different objects flow imprevisibly. Post-modern object becomes the “fetish”, the “totem” where social body remembers itself. The invasion of the natural and social by the “reified” objects makes any attempt of a planned control by a manipulating subject very difficult. We begin to live in an aura weaved by mystical objects. The world of objects is no more mastered by anybody; post-modern object revenges by returning to ambivalent symbolism. It reenchants the world disenchanted by modernity.

Hence, Maffesoli does not observe a programmed system of objects in commodity fetishism. The order of post-modern object is rather like a kaleidescope which is a programmed uncertainty. It is a diffraction to the infinity. The nature of the post-modern object is not evolutionary, objects revolt against their programmed finality (either in the form of invisible hand or history); they re-evolutionize (in the sense of revolving) their order in order to subvert it. In each order, the “system of objects” has a different logic. It is a nature in a state of permanent creation through its degeneration, instead of an evolutionary nature where the strongest survives.

The masses do not converge toward a “standard package” through consumption but they diverge toward multiplicity. This gives rise to a more complex society which is fragmented and disseminated with a multiplicity of contradictory values instead of homogeneous and linear order of modernity. Post-modernity, like the Baroque, degenerates and regenerates different styles harmoniously through small details (Maffesoli 1990, 1988).

Gilles Lipovetsky (Lipovetsky 1987) criticizes the critiques of consumption society and mass culture and concludes that fashion is not a form of “soft neo-totalitarianism”, “repressive tolerance” but on the contrary, the expansion of the public questioning, autonomization of public thought and the agent of individualist dynamic in its divers manifestations. In this sense, fashion is the ultimate phase in today’s democratical societies. Lipovetsky also observes a “ruse of reason”, a popular wisdom in the crazy orgy of mass culture: collective reason advances by the help of its opposite, the irrational heteronomy of the seduction. As in the rational city of the antiquity whose rationality was formed by a network of egoist passions, autonomous subjectivities develop themselves through seduction and ephemere, critical, realist consciousness develops itself through frivolousness in today’s consumption societies.

Hence, with its ambivalent structure, today’s individual constitutes and reconstitutes itself in the unordered order of generalized fashion. On the other hand, this unordered does not represent an ideal system, a best of the worlds but a possibility toward a more free, better informed society. Generalized fashion lives in paradoxes: its consciousness favors unconsciousness, its craziness the spirit of tolerance, its mimetism individuality, and its frivolity the respect of human rights.

CONCLUSION

We are living an explosion of the universalist reason and post-modern consumer does not behave totally reasonably. He/she lives in an emotional aura where the borders between the real and imaginary are blurred; maybe in a hyperreality where the ordered reality is replaced by its simulacra. The closed systems of thought which refer to economics, sexuality, politics etc., as the content of reality deconstruct themselves. The referentials come and go like comets in the sky making a general theory of consumer behavior ridiculous. Not only does the consumer behave according to the caprices of fashion; but also its “science”. They interactively transform each other towards new fashions in a reversible, baroque cycle of seduction. In the 1950s consumer was “homo economicus; in the 60s he was “homo sexualis”; in the 70s he was “homo politicus”; in the 80s he was “Rambo”- “homo survivalis” with a manager’s suit at the top and naked as a savage at the bottom- with an American Indian mother and a German father. In the 90s there is no reason for not to presuppose that he is becoming a “homo ecologicus”. However, these cycles are not “trends”. They do not assume a linear development which exclude one another. Rather, each cycle collapses onto and into the other squeezing the other layers to form colorful pieces of quartz.

Last but not least I would like to comment on our position as a social scientist, citizen and consumer in this changing world.Post-modernity gives an end to the the dichotomy of order and chaos. We are living in a jungle where order of chaos generates its colorfulness and its peril. It may turn into a joyful spectacle where different species enjoy to share the same ecosystem or a carnage where the stronger cannibalizes the other. Although we have renounced all “grand responsibilities” implied by a rational puritan morality; we need to develop “little respons-abilities”, (ability to respond), responsibilities of cohabitation in everyday life depending on ethics of existence, a manner of being which would turn post-modern life into communion rather than cannibalism. Since we are con-damned to live in this jungle; since “we may have come with different boats or canoes, but today we are in the same boat” (Martin Luther King), we have to learn live together.. (After all ?) Hence, what are you doing after the orgy?

REFERENCES

Adorno Theodore (1973), The Jargon of Authenticity, Evanson: Northwestern University Press.

Bataille Georges (1985), Visions of Excess, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Baudrillard Jean (1970), La Societe de Consommation, Paris: S.G.P.P.

Baudrillard Jean (1990), Seduction, Montreal: New World Perspectives.

Baudrillard Jean (1983), Simulations, New York: Semiotext(e).

Beckman James (1979), The Religious Dimension of Socrates’ Thought, Ontario: Wilfred Carrier University Press.

Bottomore Tom (1984), The Frankfurt School, London: Tavistock.

Cristaudo Wayne (1991), The Metaphysics of Science and Freedom, Aveburry: Aldershot.

Dawson Miles Menaender (1924), The Ethics of Socrates, New York: Putnam.

De Certeau Michel (1984), Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Deleuze Gilles (1983), Nietzsche and Philosophy, London: Athlone Press.

Dichter Ernest (1960), Strategy of Desire, New York: Doubleday and CompanyInc.

Freud Sigmund (1961), Beyond the Pleasure Principle, New York: Norton.

Grumley John E. (1989), History and Totality: Radical Historicism from Hegel to Foucault, London: Routledge.

Lipovetsky Gilles (1987), L’Empire de L’Ephemere, Paris: Gallimard.

Maffesoli Michel (1988), Le Temps des Tribus, Paris: Meridien.

Maffesoli Michel (1990), Aux Creux des Appairances, Paris: Plon.

Mandel Ernest (1969), Marxist Economic Theory, New York: Monthly Review Press.

Mandel Ernest (1973), The Marxist Theory of Alienation, New York: Pathfinder.

Marcuse Herbert (1966), Eros and Civilization, Boston: Beacon.

Ostenfeld Erik (1987), Ancient Greek Psychology and Modern Mind-Body Debate, Aarhus: Aarhus University Press.

Packard Vance (1957), The Hidden Persuaders, New york: D. McKay Co.

Parsons Talcott; Smelser Neil (1956), Economy and Society, Glencoe: Free Press.

Parsons Talcott (1964), Social Structure and Evolution of Action Theory, Glencoe: Free Press.

Richard Michel (1980), Besoin et Desir en Societe de Consommation, Lyon: Chronique Social.

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source: http://www.acrwebsite.org/search/view-conference-proceedings.aspx?Id=7298

The post WHAT ARE YOU DOING AFTER THE ORGY? or Does the consumer really behave (well)? by Ahmet Suerdem appeared first on Void Network.

Europe has built a fortress around itself to protect itself from ‘illegal’ immigration from the South, from peoples fleeing civil war, conflict and devastating poverty. The story is best understood through maps.

The Forbidden World

It is a strange thing, this paranoid fear of invasion, this determination to protect themselves at all costs from these human beings who every year exile themselves from their homelands to head for an imagined promised land in the rich countries. But the rich have decided that these tides of humanity are unwanted.

They fortify their frontiers, erect barriers, build the walls higher and higher. A veritable military strategy put into effect to keep out the “invaders.”

In an act of mimicry, other important countries like Brazil, China and Russia are joining in, putting in place their own “fortifications” to limit economic migration from poorer areas to their own regions of rapid growth.

Such physical obstacles are efficient tools for criminalizing immigration, for making it possible to pronounce concepts that should be unthinkable: “Illegal immigrant.” They make people think they are breaking the law. With the help of these new obstacles, juridical and physical, we have created a new category of criminal: the migrant.

Thus do we confound both international law and universal values.

Europe’s Three Frontiers

This map was drawn for the first time in 2003, thanks to the meticulous work of Olivier Clochard of the Migrinter Institute at the University of Poitiers. We update it regularly, and alas, every time we have to add more black dots and draw the red circles even bigger.

On Jan. 1, 1993, Gerry Johnson is discovered dead. A citizen of Liberia – a country at the time being destroyed by a bloody civil war – Johnson had suffocated in a train freight car in Feldkirch, Austria. On Oct. 3, 2013, a boat sinks near the shore of Lampedusa Island, with 500 immigrants on board, most of them from East Africa. Between these two dates and these two places, more than 17,300 other immigrants – and that is the low estimate for this unknown hecatomb – lost their lives while trying to get to Europe, the continent of liberty and human rights.

They die while trying to leave, too, like Marcu Omofuma, a Nigerian murdered on May 1, 1999 by three sadistic Austrian policemen aboard a Balkan Air plane during his forced repatriation.

The geography of an unwanted humanity

To the West are our pals, who are welcome to come over; they are the ones with the fat wallets. To the East, the unwanted, the unwashed, the little guys from a world too poor to ’deserve’ us. A near perfect symmetry: clusters of the poor persist in the West, and clusters of the rich in the East.

Manichean? Hardly. The political geography of European visas shows with a certain cruelty Europe’s vision of the world, an ungenerous thing. Someone must explain to me the logic of the EU requirement that the citizens of Kosovo — one of the poorest countries in Europe – purchase overpriced visas to be able to move around in the Schengen zone.

There are many methods of dividing the world, its territories, its regions. Whether it be according to the principle of the nation state, or of groups of nations, or by socioeconomic or political indicators, they all remind us cynically of what we would prefer not to see in ourselves: our selfishness, our violence. We pretend to aid in development of poor countries, while in reality we export economic models that cannot work.

And then we impose on their people our unattainable visas.

And yet, impoverished Africa like elsewhere, has culture, music, theater. Diplomats, teachers. Students, workers. writers. All are the human beings that Europe sends back tied up like sausages on airplanes – when it does not send them back wrapped in burial shrouds — for failing to obtain a visa or a residency card.

This project owes much to the careful work of the Dutch NGO United,
without whom this butchery would remain largely unknown.

Read also Alain Maurice and Claire Rodier, “The EU’s expulsion machine”, June 2010.

article’s source: http://mondediplo.com/blogs/mapping-europe-s-war-on-immigration

The post “Mapping Europe’s war on immigration” by Philippe Rekacewicz appeared first on Void Network.

Abstract:

It is widely known that Greece faces one of the most precarious and transformative periods of its modern history. Greek society has come to learn, in a baleful manner, that crisis is the sequence of its former political inefficiencies and a slump that must be overcome. The pressure of this awareness leads people to deface previously established social convictions about the self and the world. In this procedure, social and mass media articulate and (re)produce discourses from above, below and the past so to capitalize the present for a new and solid horizon for the future. This article challenges five beliefs that circulate in the Greek public sphere inculcating their incontrovertible realities: the end of Post-Polity era (the ‘former’ political status quo of Greece known as Metapolitefsi), the revival of ethno-socialist movements, the debt crisis of eurozone countries, youth’s stand for social change and the role Greece plays in this global financial turmoil comprise the contents of this critical debate. What I suggest, is that apart from the obvious misfortunes of crisis, the performative effects of the imposed vision of the well-regulated state brings forth collective feelings of offence and oppression in such ways that old divisive ideas about Greece are awaken, reducing the country to a zone of social change in which the subject renegotiates its sense of individuality and community.

Introducing a precarious state

The name Metapolitefsi has come to identify the last 30 years of civic life in Greece. In Greek it means the transition from one regime to another or from one way of being involved in politics to another. In the contemporary collective consciousness though, the name embeds the fall of junta in 1974 and the institution of parliamentary democracy. For British historian Mark Mazower (2000: 7), the name is connected with Greece’s ‘return to some semblance of tranquility’ after ‘Europe’s bloodiest conflict between 1945 and the breakup of Yugoslavia’ among the Left and the Right that started even before the Second World War. The seven-year junta, he observes, was the last bloody chapter of this civil conflict and, for that, Metapolitefsi embodies the promise of a new governmental state deprived of the terror of ideological persecutions and national disunity.

The term Post-Polity I use, aspires to capture the three-fold quality of the name Metapolitefsi that itself obscures due to its historical weight: the political changeover of the year 1974 (what is widely accepted in the Greek public sphere), the transition of one regime to another (the etymology of the word itself) and the promise the preposition post (Meta) withholds, both as an effort to heal past wounds and a quest for a new future. The Post-Polity regime that characterizes the last 30 years of Greece is indeed so grounded to this promise, that it is unattainable to fully understand the political transitions that happened within – such as Greece’s dedication to the European vision and the ideal of the socio-democratic welfare state – or the collective feeling of distress that have grown since 2009 due to the austerity measures taken as to deal with the so called ‘debt crisis’, without taking seriously the resurgent discourses about the ‘end of Metapolitefsi’ that characterize today’s political rhetoric. In the present year of 2012, Greece is under the International Monetary Fund’ s (IMF) instructions for structural reforms inherent to the neo-liberal paradigm and, as a result, a new horizon is procreated ‘from above’ with multiple side effects in the way people deal with their current predicament.

June’s 2012 election results evinced the five-year Greek depression’s simmering trends; yet they still came with a shock for the public sphere. They were a shock, above all, because of the destined way the results affirmed themselves: the striking fall of the once dominant socialist party, the change of the two-party system after the youth, the ‘indignants’ and many other frustrated people’s turn to the radical left, and the rise of the ethno-socialist movements are some of the tangible events registered in the Greek social body. At that time, voters and candidates, dazzled in front of the T.V. screens, ruminated over the ‘already’ predicted yet seemingly unforeseen outcome. Fated and expected as they were though, the Greek election results still mask the presence of all these rampant and perilous events that color the current socio-political setting: anti-immigrants attacks by armed para-state nationalist groups, forest arsons on the eve of the election and stock market sabotages with en masse capital flight affirm and expose the frightful financial and political web. This unnerving scene cannot be seen as a consequence of Greek crisis alone, but as a constitutive feature of this transitory period. Still, ‘Greek crisis’ can be a flexible field for apprehending and communicating the symptoms of this contemporary social change.

The post that never comes: ‘I’m living a dream, don’t wake me up!’[2]

Since the arrival of the IMF and the official announcement of crisis, debates about the end of Post-Polity era has dominated the political discourses. At the same time, the ‘post’ of the Post-Polity regime was speculatively linked to the causes of the current misfortune and the IMF’s proposed reforms. In brief, the ‘end of Metapolitefsi’, has marked today’s collective imaginary, in reference to crisis only – a condition I would like to discuss as a starting point for my reflections. The German literary critic Andreas Huyssen discusses the ‘end of modernism’ in a similar manner. He sees postmodernism as a field of collective memory for the imaginative production of modernism. ‘The problem’, as he says, ‘is not what modernism really was, but rather […] how it functioned ideologically and culturally after World War II’ (Huyssen 1986: 186). In a way, the post for Huyssen has been introduced in the context of a disengaging process and has served for the production of knowledge(s) displaced from the modern myths of progress and rationality. In a similar fashion, I believe that the post of the Post-Polity era exists only as a performative gesture of retrospective accusation that functions as a political tool for the discomfiture of the Post-Polity societal claims for a socio-democratic welfare state, and for the acceptance of the sacrifices needed to reform the Greek society – in the neo-liberal paradigm – for its return to much awaited political and financial stability.

Thereby, the identity of that post media usually portray to make the need of a new structural paradigm more plausible and appealing doesn’t indicate an already here present. It rather belongs to a manifold process of incriminating Greece’s recent political past, aimed to support the abrupt importation of neo-liberal reforms formerly considered ‘extreme’; disclosing, at the same time, the empowerment and encouragement, in a local level, of ‘the same global rhetoric about horizons of long-term economic growth’ (Guyer 2007: 410). Thus, this incrimination process serves for the penalization of the epistemic and ideological platform of the Post-Polity regime, leading all previous governments to a rampant criticism in terms of corruption, misappropriation and embezzlement. In result, the identity of that post as an outcome of this incrimination performance synthesizes and channels a public demand for a complete political change; a demand though, in which the ideological platform of these streamlined accusations is delicately masked.

To understand the identity of the post of the Post-Polity era in accordance to the sensitive issue of the societal claim for change, we have to ruminate over the imaginative construction of the past by the media and their capacity to effectively channel public’s discomfort and complaints. It is imperative in order to understand the massive salary and pension reductions – in some cases exceeding the 50 per cent – the increase of working hours, the extensive dismissals of bureaucratic personnel, the increase of personal taxes and the discontinuing of many social provisions; measures impossible for a previous government to take, and now enacted in only three years time. Because, for a society to accept the dismissal of all its social accomplishments, means to feel critical for the whole infrastructure that made them possible in the first place. So, Greece performs this ‘new’ identity of the post, by preserving a collective trauma (i.e. corruption, as the bankruptcy of Post-Polity’s promises) so to recast the image of its past and to extort a different – yet once criticized – field of innovations. Thus, the post of the Post-Polity is not a temporal event but an affective condition grounded in the population’s unconfessed complicity for the failures of Greece’s former political and economical life. A complicity (re)produced dialogically with the praise of a lawful and congruous state in the liberal market context.

The return of the damned as (mass-mediated) democracy’s self-punishment

The imaginative construction of the Post-Polity era was heralded in with the establish-ment of the democratic constitution. At the time of the 1980s, the opening of the press and television market to private interests, attached Post-Polity governments to the tele-visual way of conversing with people and to mass media holders’ political and financial interests. In the affective condition of the post, this notion of ‘financial interests’ pertains to a grid of secret, masked and undercover agreements that is not only used for the incrimination of Greece’s most recent political past, but also for the mystification of the current situation in terms of conspiracies and concealed – global or otherwise – plans.[3]Consequently, one of the manifestations of the political strategy to implicate Post-Polity in the ordeals of the present is a sound distrust towards political life as a whole, in addition to the general disregard of the (social)democratic welfare.

In the Greek public sphere’s collective imaginary, democracy’s corruption is felt, first and foremost, in the collapse of expectations that were cultivated by the two main Post-Polity parties. Previous election slogans remain engraved on voters’ memory, such as ‘The citizen first’, ‘Greece first’, ‘Hat-in-hand’[4] and ‘People won’t forget what the Right stands for’[5], they are now internalised in the affective condition of the post and are inverted from their initial meaning producing a nervous turn towards nationalistic and patriotic movements; particularly towards the one that vaunts for authenticity: Golden Dawn. The slogan ‘The citizen first’[6], as the last ‘lie’ of the Post-Polity era becomes, in a reflective way, the ground for questing that promise’s literal sense through the shadows and the ghosts of the now wounded democratic system. In other words, mass-mediated democracy’s promises are quested through the constitutive Other of Post-Polity’s regime, which is the ‘reprehensible’ ethno-socialist ideal.[7]

This turn to patriotic movements is, obviously, coherent with the ultra right-wind streams of fanaticism that dominated Greece in the years after the civil war (see Mazower 2000). The Post-Polity regime had denoted, in a reserved way, the termination of the ideological divisions through Greece’s devotion to the European social-democratic ideal. And despite its incrimination, most people are not willing to ‘remind’ themselves the post civil-war traumas.[8] Since Golden Dawn’s allocutions are disjoint from previous military languages, the ‘politics of memory’ which permeate the political disputes of Post-Polity create a political space in line with the affective condition of the post. Namely, Golden Dawn’s rhetoric of hate on leftists, corrupted politicians, gays, foreigners, artists and academics, is based on an accusation of national betrayal due to financial, diplomatic or other partialities. [9] This is the common ground that relates the incrimination of the Post-Polity regime with the fanatic ruffle of Golden Dawn: the affective condition of guilt being embedded in the madness of revenge.

Thereby, Golden Dawn, the political party/movement that, as mass media portray, cannot be controlled by ‘democracy’ shines through the darkness it promises and its unlawful attacks against the corrupted political system. In voters’ consciousness, Golden Dawn becomes the par excellence agent of blackmail that places the ‘citizen-punisher’ into parliament life. It also becomes the carrier of the reformed model of ‘citizen’, a one that needs protection from the mass media, which are presented by Golden Dawn as an instrument of the threatening global forces that lead people to precarious states with their conspiratorial policies of nation, race and gender boundary disturbance. The paradoxical relationship of hate between Greek mass media and the Golden Dawn party reveals the power and the limits of modern mass mediated democratic system, in which the claim for the ‘lost’ democratic ideal brings forth inglorious movements for democracy’s complete and apocalyptic disablement.

Greece in a ‘state of emergency’ or the state of exception as a condition of crisis

It was after the elections of 2009 that Greece entered into economic ‘crisis.’ Its public announcement came from the lips of the newly elected prime minister himself, G. A. Papandreou, who declared that Greece now was in a ‘state of emergency.’ On his invitation, consultants from the European Union (EU) and the IMF arrived in Athens in no time to help the government take the necessary steps to decrease the deficit and improve the economy overall. This governmental discourse on Greece’s ‘state of emergency’ – as Greece’s state of exception from the markets – was necessary for today’s crisis to take shape and for the stigmatization of the Post-Polity regime as responsible for it. Additionally, the vision of a lawful, modern and Europeanized state became the rule for this ‘state of exception’ to take shape, presaging and arranging a field of changes and reforms which without crisis wouldn’t have been possible; and to which not only Greece but all European countries must conform. Mass media and political agents were the main channel for this grand narrative to take form and until now the vision of a modernized state is still the one that acts as a metaphor for a desired outcome.

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben uses Carl Schmitt’s concept of ‘state of exception’ to investigate the exceptional measures taken in periods of political crisis. He believes that the legal measures taken in states of exception cannot be easily understood from a legal point of view. For him, they are political, insomuch as the state of exception entails the paradoxical position of presenting itself as the legal form of that which can have no legal form. He, then, stresses the importance of the condition in which the state of exception becomes the rule, so the exceptional measures turn into government techniques and, as a result, the once familiar form of political constitution loses its traditional distinctions (Agamben 1998: 122). In a way, since this evasive state becomes the rule, an opening for a space devoid of law occurs where different power relations may become proximate As he puts it, the state of exception is the provenance of every juridical placement since it opens up a space for the stabilization of a new kind of order (Agamben 1998: 19).

Using Agamben’ s analyses, we may say that the Greek government’s decision to except Greece from the markets, due to its inability to fulfill its debt obligations, and put it under IMF’ s patronage, as the figurative schema which supervises and controls them, is not just part of a procedure that disciplines or re-programs Greece (what both ill or well disposed discourses tend to put forward) but rather a part of one, that tests the ability of the EU to sanction the new principles of its restructuring. A speculation that leads us to think that the abrupt reforms Greece is forced to adopt belong to a political intention of reforming European governance. So, in a way, Greece, the last geographical and financial frontier of the EU becomes, simultaneously, the barometer of European deficiencies and the laboratory of multiple strategies for EU reform. In this sense, the ‘advanced European country’ as the rule for the ‘state of exception’ to take shape becomes the exception itself, for Greece becomes now the lawless space in which the ‘new European country’ is procreated. The fact that G. A. Papandreou declared with such ease ‘either we change or we sink’ to every European council denotes that there is a vision of a new financial, governmental and state order at stake, which is continuously being exceeded as a trace, although never denominated as such.

Thus, we may assume that the danger of Euro’s collapsing doesn’t just show the ‘structural’ problems of the European countries, but, much more, it shows the liberating ‘structural’ solution of a more coordinated, flexible and effective governing mechanism. The language Europeans officials use, such as the statements German and French prime ministers frequently make about a ‘European government’, a ‘trans-European executive authority’ or a constitution of a federation like the United States of America (USA) don’t belong to an abstract vision of European consummation, but they hold a very specific projection of a modernized European future, which is being anticipated in the present as a virtual horizon through this crisis. In this fashion, the ‘event of crisis’ is not just an objective social and economic matter needing attendance, but a bio-political laboratory of key signifiers that connect everyday life with the projection of the future.

Youth’s stand for change: ‘In these elections, we hide our grandparent’s ID cards!’[10]

Greek society is filled with outbursts of riots each and every time a package of austerity measures passes the parliament. Images of the most raging scenes are traveling around the world declaring, in a way, that the Greek public denies to submit to a change imposed ‘from above’. We might say that this disobedience belongs, in some measure, to the same spirit of demanding political change, as the one that Theodore Roszak (1968) finds in the ‘counterculture movement’ which flourished in the USA and Western Europe in the 1960s. In his effort to make sense of the huge wave of confidence people had in changing the world, Roszak observes that 50 per cent of those populations was below the age of 25. In respect to his observation, I ought to note, that Greece of 2012 has 50 per cent of its population over the age of 40;[11]and it is this part that accomplished its life-goals at the Post-Polity era. That means that a great deal of the Greek population operates with an outward mark of obeisance towards the austerity policies, in fear of losing its vested interests; while simultaneously, the young productive force embodies this part of society that craves for change, as it suffers the unbearable violence of austerity.

This picture becomes a lot evident during the months running up to the June 2012 election. that were marked with massive protests, riots and acts of disobedience. The confirmation of the belief for ‘discipline’ found Greeks tacitly divided, facing, through this ‘involuntary’ choice of austerity, memories of this ‘long forgotten’ polarization between the Left and the Right. Through the 30 years of Post-Polity, these oppositions may had been smoothed over, but, as Danforth and Boeschoten (2012) have shown, there are still strong communities of memory – people that have witnessed the civil war – that ‘would vote’ for stability only to ‘forget’ the past. That is, this belief for discipline fully embodies the memory of past national misadventures, while the youth, in an ironic way, incarnate the part of the population that crave for change; even in the cost of dismantling the relative peace made in the Post-Polity era.[12] Thus, being young in modern Greece means to feel a minority force in the construction of Greece’s future. For a young person, to live in Greece means to partake in the collective depression of seeing his/ her expectations and demands be set aside for the sake of older people’s (bank accounts) safety and their fear of new national misadventures. Hence, current prime minister Antonis Samaras’ rhetorical campaign dwelled on the catastrophic scenario of Greece’s exit of eurozone is not such a surprise; as timid and divisive (and alien to the youths) as it was, it intended to reach the terrified ears of the seniors. It was also of no coincidence that in his first post-election speech he was eager to thank ‘the masses of youth that supported him’.

Half of Greece’s population has experienced the post-war, post-occupation and/or post civil-war traumas. It grew up out of ‘nothing’, yet with plenty of opportunities to make its dreams possible. It also grew up with the need to escape rural life and the desire to live the modern urban, consumerist (and with one or two kids) nuclear family life. Greek families, as shown in respective ethnographies, are formed with the principle of ‘honor’. That is, the collectivity of the family is bounded when the individual’s shares and interests conjoint with the safekeeping of the family’s private sphere. Many theorists (Campbell 1983, Herzfeld 1987) have pointed ‘honor’ as an indicator for both structural continuity and social change. Despite differences, all commentators will agree that massive urbanization and industrial modernisation have shifted the ways ‘honor’ is manifested, yet it is still a way to understand the boundaries of the family by means of individual action. Yet, in the site of crisis, this ‘peculiar Greek individualism’ (Abdela 2002: 218) is presented in ambivalent terms. Because the boundaries of the family seem to frame both of these contradictory tendencies of muffled safety and rabid escapism; denoting the multiple articulation of ‘honor’ itself which family’s private sphere retains.

On one hand, the image of the paternalistic Greek family gets blurred in the misty shadow of crisis and reveals an opportunistic dimension which face such a concern for its offspring’s future, that it even accepts their sacrifice. On the other, the idea we have of the overprotective behavior of the Greek family shatters with the ‘event of crisis’, as ‘honor’ is detached from the strict connotations of the family’s private sphere’s interests. Through these multiple shiftings in individual concerns, the ‘young’ are forced to claim a space of ‘adult’ decisions and deny a juvenile precariousness, nourished by their elders. For the adults, a sense of sacrificing the most sacred gifts like security and (paternalistic) protection is produced, with their offspring as the first victims, who now ought to re-learn how to be modern. Thus, current youth’s stand for social change is not just clashing with some restraining and conservative forces (what can be easily conceived through the mainstream ideological platforms) but with an attitude of passive impartiality that shares this uncofessed complicity for the ‘failures’ of the past. Crisis, as it seems, is another plateau of modernization where the Greek subject reconfigures its individuality and sense of community. It is a contemporary rite of passage for Greek society; a process of violent adultness for all generations.

Greece, the cradle of the world.

In an article of his that was popular within the Greek public, British historian Mark Mazower (2011) says that Greece’s national history goes hand in hand and sometimes presages the great changes of the modern western world. The 19^th century great empires’ fall, the adventure and collapse of Nazism, the European cold war division, the expansion of the EU and now the crisis of the worldwide financial system spark are, as he points out, resultants of modern Greek history. At the same time, the little country of Greece acquires the heroic and tragic role of being ‘in the forefront of the fight for the future.’[13]I don’t find the real role of Greece in the worldwide theatre of changes that important; to my mind, each country partakes with a different role and degree of tragedy in this play. But, what I really find interesting is that Mazower takes up a philhellenic tradition in a time of war; representing Greece’s various resistances ‘as the noblest of causes’[14].

In a non-committal way, this popular article belongs to a storehouse of help that encourages the revival of the Greek spirit, by internalizing in the collective imagination the belief of a ‘Great Greece’ that holds the capacity of an explosive way of participating in ‘worldwide negotiations’. Having the feeling of this capacity means to cultivate, in a collective manner, the conviction that not only Greeks are capable of, but it is incumbent upon them to counteract against any assault to their private/national domain. The ability to unilaterally terminate the memorandum and to refuse paying off the debt, as well as the ‘invitation’ of an ultra-right wing ethno-socialist party in a European parliament, belong to the same reactionary context fed by a tank of allegories that share a common psychic denial best understood with the psycho-analytical themes of sublimity, egocentricity, narcissism, fear of loss, inability to accept criticism and various vindication fantasies.

What I actually want to say here is that the existential fear of a country in crisis, once it internalizes the capacity of assaulting the worldwide financial web, makes it ‘dangerous’ insofar as this country reflexively increases its metonymic power to protect itself by means of attacking the joints of the skeletal structure which finds itself entrapped in. So, to visualize the characteristics of a country in a precarious state, one has to bear in mind this shrewd oscillation between the capability of an explosive reaction and attending the exhortations for legitimacy. In that sense – and in a diametrical opposition to Mazower’s view – for a country to be ‘the cradle of the world’ means to be a screen for projecting the worldwide circulating needs for change and, at the same time, a camera that projects for itself the eventualities of crisis as a virtual horizon for the whole world. Greece as the cradle of the world is the crisis’ point of no return. And it resounds the crisis’s center since it has been reduced to a laboratory of multiple and contradictory narratives and metaphors of an imminent future through the most common conspiratorial stories of the hidden, yet terribly tangible, global financial relations.

‘Capitalizing’ these five thoughts

In illustration of what I have said, I am tempted to use another ‘common’ belief, one that is not only ‘Greek’ but, on the contrary, it resounds the global image of the modern and well-regulated state in the market’s context. It is the one saying that societies ought to control, as a moral stance, the financial steering wheel of their country. In the event of crisis, we can see that what this stereotype conceals is the disconnection of the steering wheel from the rest of the vehicle’s navigation system and its participation in automated, by ‘invincible’ programmers, steering movement transmission systems. In the context of Greek crisis, it is a matter of trust of a faded and frayed map, with a very great obligation involved in society’s part, to show a brave, authoritative and confident attitude. In other words, it means that what the Greek society has to prove is not that it can take the ‘right direction’, but rather that it can take on its back the burden of change imposed by the ‘international fund community’, as an after-effect of the harsh prescription for stability. Stereotypes like this, are not just vehicles for imposing, ‘from above’, the vision of a well regulated state, but they zigzag in monstrous rhythms in and out of multiple private and public spheres, producing ambivalent images of the self and the world (see Athanasiou 2007; Guyer 2007).

For the subject, the event of crisis becomes a zone for renegotiating the idea of self and community. The violence of this process is not just evident in the reduction of salaries and expenses, as politics of reform. It is presented in the products of this shrewd oscillation between the vision of a well regulated future and the apocalyptic dystopias of the present. This oscillation is an evidence of the contradictions of the eurozone figure as well. Because for Greek society to be in this crisis means to occupy EU’s margins and at the same time cry with all its strength about its inefficiencies. For the same reasons, EU learns through this crisis how to reinstate its authoritative and paternalistic role, by trying schemes and models for an updated inter-national paradigm. Therefore, the post of the Greek Post-Polity era is something more than Greece’s passing to a regime of risk and precariousness. It means that Greek society is living the parallel eventualities of crisis in which novel horizons are reflexively projected as the European rescue plans are being tested. In this condition, Greece becomes a social zone for reconfiguring its sense of orientation through facing the same divisions, exclusions and ideal projections which haunt its past and have made its present possible. And yet, the sense of its present is linked to the future as an image governed by the forces that control the financial steering wheel of the country. Ultimately, to capitalize on the present amidst a condition of crisis means to force a specific value onto the future; a value that conceals all the social and financial relations that produce it and sustain it.

Bibliography:

Abdela, E. (2002) “For Reasons  of Honour”: Violence, Emotions and Values in Post-Civil-War Greece. Athens: Nefeli.

Agamben, G. (1998 [1995]) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. tr. D. Heller-Roazen. Stanford University Press.

Athanasiou, A. (2007) Life at the Edge: Essays on Body, Gender and Biopolitics. Athens: Ekkremes (in Greek).

Campbell, J. K. (1983) ‘Traditional Values and Continuities in Greek Society’. Pp. 184-207 in R. Clogg (ed.) Greece in the 1980s. London: Macmillan.

Danforth, L. M. & Boeschoten, R. V. (2012) Children of the Greek Civil War: Refugees and the Politics of Memory. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Guyer, J. I. (2007) ‘Prophecy and the Near Future: Thoughts on Macroeconomics, Evangelical, and Punctuated Time’. American Ethnologist. 34 (3): 409-421.

Herzfeld, M. (1987) ‘“As in Your Own House”: Hospitality, Ethnography, and the Stereotype of Mediterranean Society’. Pp. 75-89 in D.D. Gilmore (ed.) Honor and Shame and the Unity of the Mediterranean. Washington, D.C.: American Anthropological Association.

Huyssen, A. (1986) After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Mazower, M. (ed.) (2000) After the War was Over: Restructuring the Family, Nation, and State in Greece, 1943- 1960. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Mazower, M. (2011) ‘Democracy’s cradle, rocking the world’. The New York Times. [online]. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/30/opinion/30mazower.html?_r=1[Accessed 14 September 2012].

Papailias, P. (ed.) (2011) ‘Hot spots: beyond the “Greek crisis”.’ Cultural Anthropology [online]. Available at http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/432[Accessed 4 November 2012].

Roszak, T. (1968) The Making of a Counterculture: Reflections of the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition. New York: Doubleday & Company Inc.

[1] This article belongs to an effort to ground “crisis” and its aftereffects to an academic glossary and debate. An earlier version of some of the arguments made here has been published on the Cultural Anthropology website (see Papailias 2011).

[2] A famous slogan coming from a Greek advertisement for mobile services. The protagonist – a hot dog seller – promises more ingredients than the other ones, building in a way a promise-land of goods that is within a grasp.

[3] It is very common in today’s anti-memorandum parties to take on discourses of “intrusion of the banking lobby”,  “global loan sharks”, “media’s terrorism for the manipulation of voters” etc.

[4] It was one the basic instructions former prime minister K. Karamanlis (2004- 2009) gave to his ministers, to persuade the people of Greece that his government had no intention of being implicated in scandals and corruption.

[5] One of the most well known and repeated slogans of the socialist party of PA.SO.K. The slogan attacks the right-wing party, by “reminding” the society the seven years of military junta.

[6] It was the main slogan G.A. Papandreou used for PA.SO.K. pre-election campaign of 2009. At the second month of his presidency he called the IMF for financial support.

[7] I make this speculation due to the fact that Post-Polity’s ideological platform was built in difference to junta’s military governments and royalist regimes.

[8] For the ‘politics of memory’ in accordance with the Greek civil war adventure and post civil war main governmental policies, see Danforth & Boeschoten (2012).

[9] It is important to note that the main policy Golden Dawn is practicing the few months of its parliamentary service includes attacks and persecutions of immigrants and illegal vendors. Many times it responds to calls of frustrated citizens who are unable to get help from the police. One of the latest ‘rumors’ is an attack to a public hospital’s doctor who asked for a 2.500 euro baksheesh to perform an operation. Despite what is true or false, many people have cultivated an image for Golden Dawn as the punisher who will cleanse Greece from corruption. In addition, Golden Dawn says that ‘gays’ are the next target after immigrants. The first attacks on them being a fact.

[10] A slogan spread throughout the internet social networks among young people, at the time of Greece’s most recent elections.

[11] An estimation based on the 2011 Greek population census.

[12] Youths in Greece face most of the consequences of crisis. According to the National Statistical Service of Greece, the 55 per cent of the population under the age of 25 is unemployed (referring to July of 2012).

[13] With these words Mazower ends up his article.

[14] I’m using – in an ironic political way – the same words Mazower uses to describe the feelings the philhellenists had at the time of Greece’s independence war.

Acknowledgements:

I really wish to thank Athena Athanasiou, Penelope Papailias, Vanesa Ariza Olivera, Evy Vourlides, Natalie Koutsougera, Babis Kontarakis and the editors of the Unfamiliar Journal for their insights, comments, remarks and their overall help and support. Without their contribution this article would have never been possible.

Leandros Kyriakopoulos

Panteion University of Athens

Email: Leky@mail.com

You can access my papers on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) at: http://ssrn.com/author=1706538

Leandros Kyriakopoulos is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University, completing a dissertation on psytrance festivals as heterotopias and experiences of the self as technologies of constituting humanness. His main interests include new mobility, electronic dance music cultures, new technologies, politics of place, transnationalism, identity, subjectivity.

Leandros Kyriakopoulos participates in Void Network and he took part in the creation of the book “We Are an Image from the Future / The Greek Revolt of Dec. 2008”, edited by A.G. Schwartz, Tasos Sagris & Void Network with the essay titled:

“December’s riots as mediated by the image of mass media”

you can read this essay here:  here:http://libcom.org/library/december%E2%80%99s-riots-mediated-image-mass-media

for more info about Unfamiliar Magazine were this article first published:

The Unfamiliar- an Anthropological Journal

Vol. 2, Issue 2, Winter 2012, the University of Edinburgh

26. 18-26.

The online version of the article can be found at:

http://journals.ed.ac.uk/unfamiliar/article/view/70

The post Void Network presents “THE CONDITION OF CRISIS AND THE SYMPTOMS OF SOCIAL CHANGE: FIVE FLIGHTS OF THOUGHT ON THE POST OF THE GREEK POST-POLITY ERA by Leandros Kyriakopoulos appeared first on Void Network.