A call for the global creation of collectivities that struggle for a free and authentic human life

Raoul Vaneigem[1]

We have made Mankind the shame of humanity.

From the most ancient times to the present day, no society has attained the degree of ignominy and abjection reached by an agro-mercantile civilization that, for two thousand years, has passed for Civilization par excellence.

It is undeniable that, as trans-hominids, we have inherited an instinct for predation and an instinct for mutual assistance. They constitute our share of residual animalism. But while the awareness of an interweaved solidarity has favored our progressive humanization, predatory aggressiveness has developed in us a tendency for self-destruction. Is this so difficult to understand?

The appearance of an economy that sacrifices life for work, for Power, for Profit, has marked a break with the egalitarianism and the symbiotic evolution of pre-agrarian civilizations. Agriculture and livestock breeding have privileged the predatory instinct, at the expense of a life drive that has never renounced the reestablishment of its usurped sovereignty.

Appropriation, competition and rivalry have pleased themselves by exalting the “civilized wild animal,” whose spiritual sublimation serves to legitimatize their enterprises. In its emblematic form, the lion thus lets one believe that it is natural to hunt and oppress the beasts. What is in fact required is the denaturation of the human being. In vain does one seek among the most pitiless carnivores the cruelty that is as deliberate or the ferociousness that is as inventive, as those demonstrated by Justice, Religion, Ideology, Empire, State and Bureaucracy.

We must see the fixed grin of the arms dealers at the moment when their billable products are tearing apart women, children, men, animals, forests and [whole] landscapes. “Make do with what you have,”[2] right?

Profit has the cynicism of a done deal [fait accompli]. It hides nothing from us about those heartless restaurants in which the fashionable ladies and gentlemen stuff themselves while their luxury shoes drip blood and excrement.

Why get involved when pre-formatted public opinion takes the side of one or another belligerent, as if it were a soccer match between Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Palestine? The bets are on and the cheers of the spectators cover the screams of the massacred crowds.

Simply cursing a foul civilization does not prevent it from perpetuating itself when we let the laws of financial rapacity orchestrate our denaturation, form the patterns of our apathy, and punctuate our frustrations by triggering explosions of a blind and murderous hatred. Add insult to injury? What would be the point? Doing so would only reinforce a personal sense of guilt that is relieved by making the others feel guilty. The predatory reflex would once again find its niche there.

The exhortations addressed to the greatest number of people are subject to a double discredit: on the one hand, the slogans and militant incitements restart the old motor of Power in which radicalism quickly hinders the radicalism of lived experience; on the other hand, what chooses to be announced from the podium of generalities is easily diluted in the hodge-podge of ideas cut off from life.

Except, that is, if the reader discovers [in that radicalism] the occasion for an intimate dialogue with herself. In other words, if she drinks from the source of the human consciousness that is in her.

Rather than address myself to the greatest number of people, I prefer to speak directly to the autonomous individual. Because she is not ignorant of the fact that my sole intention is to confide my way of seeing things to her, in a fraternal debate in which there is no need to know each other in order to recognize each other.

What better guarantee for the awakening of consciousness is there than mutual aid? It is not by chance that it is reborn spontaneously to the extent that predation ceases to hide the facts that it devours itself and makes its own self-destruction profitable.

The bankruptcy of having propagates an ennui that is worse than death, the specter of which it ceaselessly raises. And the breath of life rehabilitates being. The subject frees itself from the object, it frees itself from the thing to which reification had reduced it. Isn’t this what is implied by the adage “men and women are not commodities”? The simple changing of roles – men taking on femininity and women taking on masculinity – doesn’t change anything. From the moment that we spare children from the ravages of predatory education, we have only to leave to their spontaneous radicalism the care of awakening them to their destinies as human beings.

There is no need for prophets to foresee what is going to happen: either the triumph of the idiot who thinks with a bludgeon or the surging of a life that has regained awareness of the sovereignty that can be exerted by its humanity.

The usefulness of fascism and anti-fascism is that they hide the true final struggle, the one that – inseparably both existential and social – implies the eradication of predation, the disappearance of hierarchical Power, and the end of the barking out of orders.

The lucrative cynicism and absurdity of war, fomented by governmental and global mafias, has ended up tiring even the most obtuse of its pimps. The succession of virtually interchangeable conflicts incites “public” opinion to gradually exit from the chessboard of geopolitical schemes.

It is here and now that the appearance of May 1968,[3] the Zapatistas,[4] the Yellow Vests[5] and the combatants of Rojava[6] opens up to life and its awareness a path that the historical derailment of the agro-market Civilization has obstructed and led towards death.

Hoping for nothing does not mean despairing of everything. The return to life is a violent, natural and spontaneous reaction. It holds the power to ruin the desertification of the earth, from which profit-making is drawing the last resources. The return to life, to its authenticity, to its awareness, is our real immunological self-defense. Since denaturation hinders the nature present in and around us in the name of Profit, why not bet on it to have done with a hateful civilization? How? Don’t ask me, ask yourself, you who at every instant navigates between lethargy and revolt.

Everywhere signs of distress and jubilation mix together and multiply. Don’t be mistaken! The angry refusal of a war waged against a specifically targeted region – Palestine, in this case – goes much further than a singular disavowal. It more and more clearly expresses the execration of a war conducted, not only against the population of a particular area, but also against the people of all the countries on Planet Earth. This rejection of war has understood that, for totalitarian greed, living is a crime. This is why the new global insurrections are part of the self-defense of the living. In them are embodied both the will to abrogate a universe of psychopaths who make death profitable and the implementation of a new alliance with nurturing nature.

This is one war too many. Not for the governmental and supra-governmental weapons lobbies, not for the producers of narco-neuroleptics, but for whomever isn’t disposed to dying early by joining the party of voluntary servitude and “viva la muerte!”[7]

The problem is principally due to the doubts, to the despair, to the disappointments against which life’s firm stance collides generation after generation.

Isn’t it absurd to expect anything at all from the governmental authorities that make decisions for us and that harass us with their degrees, each one more ridiculously dishonest than its predecessor?

Despite the gloominess of the era, don’t we at least have the pleasure of seeing, right before our very eyes, the shriveling up of the Gods – those impostors who for ten thousand years have usurped the faculty of creating and creating oneself, while life, in its crazy fecundity, has in fact granted it to the human species?

The time has come to resume the course of our real destiny. The time has come to change the world and become what we want to be: not the owners of a sterile universe, but the inhabitants of a world whose abundance is such that we can enjoy it freely. Enough of this upside-down world in which profit-making becomes impoverished by impoverishing its resources! May the disappearance of harmful [sources of] energy de-pollute the water, the air, the soil, and the land so that our creative ingenuity effaces even the memory of a regrettable diversion of our evolution!

In the intensity of a desire, the present awakens to the presence of a life that doesn’t care about being measured or programmed. The joy of living initiates the art of harmonization, because it carries within itself the specifically human faculty of creating and creating oneself.

The appropriation of the soil and animal husbandry have implanted in our morals a herd instinct in which the individual sees her intelligence lowered to the level of the flocks that she feeds. What is being sketched out today is the resurgence of the autonomous individual who liberates herself from individualism and its alienated consciousness.

We are at a turning point in history, in which the elaboration of a style of life is supplanting a survival that is condemned to work and opening up an existence devoted to the comfort of palliative care.

The understanding that emanates from our vital drives highlights an incessant conflict between a perspective of life and a perspective of death, between the attraction of our desires, illuminated by our sensitive intelligence, and the hold that intellectual intelligence has over them. Because the blockage of our emotions that Wilhelm Reich called character armoring obeys the imperatives of a mechanical efficiency to which the body at work is held. And so, quite obviously, if the pleasure that comes from the cost-free nature of life [la gratuité du vivant] has no place in totalitarian greed, this means that restoring the joy of living, developing festive combativeness, and reaffirming the innocence of the living, which knows nothing of both masters and slaves, are the weapons that are of a nature to bring about the ruin of Profit.

We are in the midst of the turmoil of an enthralling combat. It marks the rebirth of our human consciousness. In it is expressed the resurgence of a dignity that has always been at the heart of our attempts at emancipation, notably in the proletarian project of a classless society. We have seen how the proletariat was dispossessed of its project by the very people who became its [alleged] defenders. It would be better to consider eradicating from the outset all forms of power – whether it is that of the mayor, a governmental official, or that of the political militant, an officer of ideology and the contestatory bureaucracy.

Among the self-proclaimed spokespeople for the people, how many are not ready to replace the State’s authority with their own?

Isn’t it a salutary resolution to desire everything, but to expect nothing? By this I mean relying on our life drives, not as an inevitable destiny, but as a creative presence that we have the freedom to experience by preventing its obstruction, by avoiding a deadly inversion, which generates emotional plagues. We have underestimated the importance of refining anger in a way that avoids the traps of urgency, of being drawn onto the terrain of the enemy, of succumbing to the militarization of political militancy. But, principally, the distance that the refinement of the emotions implies is a propitious place for the ripening of creativity. It favors the implementation of a form of guerrilla warfare that only has recourse to weapons that do not kill and are inexhaustible.

Looking back over the centuries, we can see that an awakening of consciousness has rekindled a struggle and that the renewal of mutual aid is gradually clearing away the mists of confusion.

It will be inconceivable to future generations that it took so long for us to realize that life has provided men and women with an exceptional faculty, without which they would not have gone beyond the stage of animalism. In its experimental blindness, this faculty has given us the privilege of creating and recreating the world around us.

Pre-agrarian collectivities evolved in a symbiosis with an environment from which they drew their subsistence. The emergence of the market civilization and its City-States caused a break with nature, which, once a living subject, became an object of exploitation. A system of authoritarian government endeavored to cover up the creativity of mutual aid that, “from Lucy to Lascaux,”[8] had guided an evolution that, even today, the sycophants of market civilization still have a great reluctance to uncover.

The notion of Fate prevails. It propagates a spirit of submission; it instills an ontology of accursedness; it spreads the myth of an irremediable Fall, to which we must resign ourselves, just as we must obey the arbitrary requirements of a deified master.

What is now being reborn among those who still aspire to live is the feeling of having been swindled. To the extent that the collapse of patriarchy has completed the burial of the Gods in the latrines of the past, it has also taught us to discover a fundamental difference between Fate and destiny. The scorn for life, programmed by the market civilization, has hidden under the name of Fate the active principle that I call destiny and that is nothing other than the faculty of creating ourselves by recreating the world.

Fate is a matter of Providence; it cannot be discussed; it pleads the Inevitability [Fatalité] that brings an appreciable comfort to servility.

Fate is endured; destiny is constructed. There’s nothing metaphysical about this. The atrocious barbarism of our history has never succeeded in stifling the visceral struggle that, from generation to generation, has demonstrated a will to emancipation, which is both timeless and modulated by economic, political, psychological and social fluctuations.

“Fate” and “destiny” are problematic because they have been made to be synonymous. This is why I suggest that, for greater clarity, we retain their French origins.[9]

The radicalism of the struggles for life call for human destiny to supplant Fate, Chance and Providence. It flourishes in the midst of a no man’s land[10] where an incontinent civilization empties itself of its existential substance, while a new civilization is struggling in the throes of childbirth.

During the first faltering steps of autonomy, the creative powers of men and women – though they fumble around – suddenly reveal that we are capable of developing ourselves without masters, without gurus, without tutelage. If we have had the opportunity to understand that nothing more surely attracts misfortune than the custom of wallowing in it, we must agree that, on the other hand, the enjoyment of the happiness of life is equally contagious, but in a more amiable fashion.

The unshakeable determination to cultivate our lives and the garden that is our nourishing earth simultaneously offers unstoppable assistance in the struggle against fear, guilt, self-sacrifice, Puritanism, work, power, and money. This determination nourishes the struggle against the mercantile spirit that universally ensures the promotion of anti-physical values,[11] values that are hostile to nature.

The will to individual autonomy is both alone and accompanied in its fight for the emancipation of the self. Questions of health, stability, immunity, friendship, love, pleasure, and creativity are at the heart of the emancipation of the earth illuminated by the new global insurrections. The stakes are the same: attaining freedom for the various human desires by creating a society that ensures their harmonization with each other.

In my daily life, the authenticity of lived experience is the natural guarantee of my desires. Their freedom excludes market freedoms – the freedoms to exploit, to oppress, to kill.

For the individual who seeks autonomy, freedom and authenticity constitute the paradox of an openly declared clandestinity.

The sermon of good intentions has never been as insufferable as it is in the 21st century, when alienated consciousness no longer uses kid gloves to put words to work. Under the names of terrorist, assassin, psychopath and outlaw, it designates those who, alas, are in a state of inhumanity that the frenzy of short-term profit aggravates and accelerates to match the pace of its profitable and useless great works.

I have always defended this principle: absolute freedom for all opinions, absolute proscription of all instances of inhumanity. To my mind, this is the only way to broach the questions of religion and ideology. Such a choice frees us from the humanitarian hypocrisy that affects so many ideas and beliefs. It no longer even needs to dwell on the fact that, to this point, freedom of thought has never been anything other than a market freedom.

We do not want to judge inhumanity: we want to condemn and banish it. We have no need of explanations, justifications or extenuating circumstances. It doesn’t matter if it comes from rich neighborhoods or slums, from conservatives or progressives: NO INHUMANITY IS TOLERABLE. Let this be clear and unambiguous!

We will do everything possible to eradicate from our morals the propensities to kill, injure, rape, or mistreat others, whatever the reasons that are given to explain their emergence or resurgence. We’ve had enough of the universal tribunal in which weighing, excusing, condemning, punishing, and granting amnesty perpetuate the jumping up and down of impotent indignation. Righteous anger will remain impotent as long as the “Get out of my way”[12] that condemns us to the social jungle and the predatory reflex remains embedded in each one of us.

We have had enough of the caricature of existence that has been globally popularized by narco-American evangelism! The self-made man[13] only builds and propagates his own death. That is his opening bid, gloriously displayed!

Isn’t it in the autonomous individual that we see the intensification of the pleasures of not having to answer to anyone, of being alone in the untangling, the debating and, sooner or later, the carrying out, in an alchemical mode, of a transformation of the gloomy survival that stagnates in each of us? To bring about the transmutation of a raw material – condemned to rot – into the full and complete life to which we have always aspired as human beings. The art of living replaces all that we’ve learned about dying. Such is the only form of teaching to which I want to adhere.

Enjoying my lived authenticity, as disordered as it might be, frees me from the obligation to play a role, to which individualism and the herd that guides it are constrained. It raises my awareness of the derisory and pathetic duty to appear; it frees me from the dictatorship of appearances, of the spectacle and of the fear of being weighed and judged that it constantly conveys. Isn’t true happiness the rediscovery of the innocence of being oneself, of not having to justify oneself, of desiring according to the heart without expecting or hoping for anything from the mind?

We are headed towards a new Renaissance, towards a resurgence of the Enlightenment. Our transversal path will be that of an openly declared clandestinity. The fist of profit strikes us everywhere: let’s strike back everywhere and dismember it!

Clandestinity begins within us in the “dark room” where we are alone, debating what we do not want and what we endlessly desire. It awakens us to the awareness of our life drives, the pleasures that stimulate it, and the vexations that invert and turn them into death drives.

The paradox of an openly declared clandestinity is also attested to by the anonymity of the Yellow Vests, as by the anonymity that each individual claims when she takes refuge in the dark room of her secret desires – where she alone is able to decide if she will join the system of predation and the egotistical calculus of individualism or if she will instead devote herself to the transmutation of survival into a full and complete life.

In “Fuenteovejuna,” the dramatist Lopes de Vega[14] depicts the inhabitants of a village who, tired by the cruelty of an iniquitous governor, assassinate him. Tasked with finding the culprit, judges and executioners put questions to the villagers, but they receive no other response but the name of the village, which is Fuente Ovejuna. Wearied by war, the interrogators order a general amnesty.

The anonymity demanded by individuals who struggle for their autonomous solidarity offers an example of a weapon of life. It unites the resistance to oppression. In the same way that the obstinacy of the Yellow Vests no longer needs yellow vests to be propagated, we witness the increasing presence of a life that wants to be free and unencumbered by religions, ideologies, politics, or hierarchical, governmental and globalist structures. Life above all else is the broken gun that breaks reification and teaches us how to sabotage the transformation of being into having. It radicalizes the reformist militant by dissuading him from letting the Power that he claims to combat become embedded in him.

The living carries within itself the fertility of desire. No desert can resist its fecundity. In our intimacy, the decision is taken to put an end to the moment that belongs to the time of wear and tear, work, and death and to privilege the moment and the desire for life that manifests itself in the pleasures of lived authenticity. Do you want the proof a contrario?[15] At the moment that I write this, we may observe the formidable wave of self-destructive nihilism that is overwhelming the societies eaten away by the cancer of profitability.

I give less importance to the support of a great number of people than to the intelligence of autonomous individuals, which is, due to its will to authenticity, the antidote to intellectual elitism.

Slow but inevitable, the reversal of perspective illuminates the renewal; it is the place where the reunification of the existential and the social takes place. Individual combat and the combat for a uniquely human society is one and the same thing.

Life has no need of masters, religious cults or parties.

Pleasure is the peaceful violence of the living that proliferates in and around us. It is the cost-free arrangement that confers upon us an awareness that is capable of humanizing it. This is what we are resolved to attempt to bring about.

Let’s rebuild the earth and make our communities, our neighborhoods and our regions oases that the living renders invulnerable!

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NOTES

[1] Raoul Vaneigem, «ABOLIR LA PRÉDATION, REDEVENIR HUMAIN: Appel à la création mondiale de collectivités en lutte pour une vie humaine libre et authentique». Dated January 2024. Publication by Fayard as a multi-language pamphlet (French, Italian, German and English) forthcoming. Translated by NOT BORED! 28 January 2024. All footnotes by the translator.

[2] «A la guerre comme à la guerre»: literally “in war as in war.”

[3] In France in May-June 1968, a generalized wildcat strike and an widespread occupations movement almost toppled the French government. Vaneigem himself was a participant in this movement.

[4] See “The Zapatistas’ Fight is the Universal Fight of Life Against the Desertification of the Earth,” 2019: https://notbored.org/zapatistas.pdf.

[5] See “Concerning the ‘Yellow Vests’: Everything is possible, even self-managing assemblies in the middle of street intersections, villages and neighborhoods,” 2018: https://notbored.org/yellow-vests.pdf.

[6] Rojava is a region in Northern Syria that has been autonomous since 2012.

[7] “Long Live Death!” was a fascist slogan during the Spanish Civil War.

[8] Lucy is the name given to the relatively complete fossil of the prehistoric hominid Australopithecus afarensis, which was discovered in Ethiopia in 1974. Lascaux is the name of an intermediate warming period during the Würm, which was the last glacial period in the Alpine region of Europe, and the location of famous cave drawings discovered in 1940.

[9] That is to say, Destin and destinée.

[10] English in original.

[11] In the works of François Rabelais (1483-1553) Physis is joyful and unashamed and Antiphysis is hateful and destructive.

[12] The French here is ôte-toi de là que je m’y mette: literally “get out of there so I can put myself there.”

[13] English in original.

[14] Félix Lope de Vega y Carpio (1562-1635) was Spanish playwright, poet and novelist.

[15] Latin in original: argument from the contrary.

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SOURCE: https://autonomies.org/2024/02/raoul-vaneigem-abolish-predation-become-human-again/

The post Raoul Vaneigem: Abolish Predation – Become Human Again appeared first on Void Network.

TRANSLATED by Ken Knabb 

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August 13-16, 1965, the blacks of Los Angeles revolted. An incident between traffic police and pedestrians developed into two days of spontaneous riots. Despite increasing reinforcements, the forces of order were unable to regain control of the streets. By the third day the blacks had armed themselves by looting accessible gun stores, enabling them to fire even on police helicopters. It took thousands of police and soldiers, including an entire infantry division supported by tanks, to confine the riot to the Watts area, and several more days of street fighting to finally bring it under control. Stores were massively plundered and many were burned. Official sources listed 32 dead (including 27 blacks), more than 800 wounded and 3000 arrests.

Reactions from all sides were most revealing: a revolutionary event, by bringing existing problems into the open, provokes its opponents into an inhabitual lucidity. Police Chief William Parker, for example, rejected all the major black organizations’ offers of mediation, correctly asserting: “These rioters don’t have any leaders.” Since the blacks no longer had any leaders, it was the moment of truth for both sides. What did one of those unemployed leaders, NAACP general secretary Roy Wilkins, have to say? He declared that the riot “should be put down with all necessary force.” And Los Angeles Cardinal McIntyre, who protested loudly, did not protest against the violence of the repression, which one might have supposed the most tactful policy at a time when the Roman Church is modernizing its image; he denounced “this premeditated revolt against the rights of one’s neighbor and against respect for law and order,” calling on Catholics to oppose the looting and “this violence without any apparent justification.” And all those who went so far as to recognize the “apparent justifications” of the rage of the Los Angeles blacks (but never the real ones), all the ideologists and “spokesmen” of the vacuous international Left, deplored the irresponsibility, the disorder, the looting (especially the fact that arms and alcohol were the first targets) and the 2000 fires with which the blacks lit up their battle and their ball. But who has defended the Los Angeles rioters in the terms they deserve?

We will. Let the economists fret over the $27 million lost, and the city planners sigh over one of their most beautiful supermarkets gone up in smoke, and McIntyre blubber over his slain deputy sheriff. Let the sociologists bemoan the absurdity and intoxication of this rebellion. The role of a revolutionary publication is not only to justify the Los Angeles insurgents, but to help elucidate their perspectives, to explain theoretically the truth for which such practical action expresses the search.

In Algiers in July 1965, following Boumédienne’s coup d’état, the situationists issued an Address to the Algerians and to revolutionaries all over the world which interpreted conditions in Algeria and the rest of the world as a whole. Among other examples we mentioned the movement of the American blacks, stating that if it could “assert itself incisively” it would unmask the contradictions of the most advanced capitalist system. Five weeks later this incisiveness was in the streets. Modern theoretical criticism of modern society and criticism in acts of the same society already coexist; still separated but both advancing toward the same realities, both talking about the same thing. These two critiques are mutually explanatory, and neither can be understood without the other. Our theory of “survival” and of “the spectacle” is illuminated and verified by these actions which are so incomprehensible to American false consciousness. One day these actions will in turn be illuminated by this theory.

Until the Watts explosion, black civil rights demonstrations had been kept by their leaders within the limits of a legal system that tolerates the most appalling violence on the part of the police and the racists — as in last March’s march on Montgomery, Alabama. Even after the latter scandal, a discreet agreement between the federal government, Governor Wallace and Martin Luther King led the Selma marchers on March 10 to stand back at the first police warning, in dignity and prayer. The confrontation expected by the demonstrators was reduced to a mere spectacle of a potential confrontation. In that moment nonviolence reached the pitiful limit of its courage: first you expose yourself to the enemy’s blows, then you push your moral nobility to the point of sparing him the trouble of using any more force. But the main point is that the civil rights movement only addressed legal problems by legal means. It is logical to make legal appeals regarding legal questions. What is irrational is to appeal legally against a blatant illegality as if it was a mere oversight that would be corrected if pointed out. It is obvious that the crude and glaring illegality from which blacks still suffer in many American states has its roots in a socioeconomic contradiction that is not within the scope of existing laws, and that no future judicial law will be able to get rid of this contradiction in the face of the more fundamental laws of this society. What American blacks are really daring to demand is the right to really live, and in the final analysis this requires nothing less than the total subversion of this society. This becomes increasingly evident as blacks in their everyday lives find themselves forced to use increasingly subversive methods. The issue is no longer the condition of American blacks, but the condition of America, which merely happens to find its first expression among the blacks. The Watts riot was not a racial conflict: the rioters left alone the whites who were in their path, attacking only the white policemen, while on the other hand black solidarity did not extend to black store-owners or even to black car-drivers. Martin Luther King himself had to admit that the revolt went beyond the limits of his specialty. Speaking in Paris last October, he said: “This was not a race riot. It was a class riot.”

The Los Angeles rebellion was a rebellion against the commodity, against the world of the commodity in which worker-consumers are hierarchically subordinated to commodity standards. Like the young delinquents of all the advanced countries, but more radically because they are part of a class without a future, a sector of the proletariat unable to believe in any significant chance of integration or promotion, the Los Angeles blacks take modern capitalist propaganda, its publicity of abundance, literally. They want to possess now all the objects shown and abstractly accessible, because they want to use them. In this way they are challenging their exchange-value, the commodity reality which molds them and marshals them to its own ends, and which has preselected everything. Through theft and gift they rediscover a use that immediately refutes the oppressive rationality of the commodity, revealing its relations and even its production to be arbitrary and unnecessary. The looting of the Watts district was the most direct realization of the distorted principle: “To each according to their false needs” — needs determined and produced by the economic system which the very act of looting rejects. But once the vaunted abundance is taken at face value and directly seized, instead of being eternally pursued in the rat-race of alienated labor and increasing unmet social needs, real desires begin to be expressed in festive celebration, in playful self-assertion, in the potlatch of destruction. People who destroy commodities show their human superiority over commodities. They stop submitting to the arbitrary forms that distortedly reflect their real needs. The flames of Watts consummated the system of consumption. The theft of large refrigerators by people with no electricity, or with their electricity cut off, is the best image of the lie of affluence transformed into a truth in play. Once it is no longer bought, the commodity lies open to criticism and alteration, whatever particular form it may take. Only when it is paid for with money is it respected as an admirable fetish, as a symbol of status within the world of survival.

Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state’s monopoly of armed violence. What is a policeman? He is the active servant of the commodity, the man in complete submission to the commodity, whose job is to ensure that a given product of human labor remains a commodity, with the magical property of having to be paid for, instead of becoming a mere refrigerator or rifle — a passive, inanimate object, subject to anyone who comes along to make use of it. In rejecting the humiliation of being subject to police, the blacks are at the same time rejecting the humiliation of being subject to commodities. The Watts youth, having no future in market terms, grasped another quality of the present, and that quality was so incontestable and irresistible that it drew in the whole population — women, children, and even sociologists who happened to be on the scene. Bobbi Hollon, a young black sociologist of the neighborhood, had this to say to the Herald Tribune in October: “Before, people were ashamed to say they came from Watts. They’d mumble it. Now they say it with pride. Boys who used to go around with their shirts open to the waist, and who’d have cut you to pieces in half a second, showed up here every morning at seven o’clock to organize the distribution of food. Of course, it’s no use pretending that food wasn’t looted. . . . All that Christian blah has been used too long against blacks. These people could loot for ten years and they wouldn’t get back half the money those stores have stolen from them over all these years. . . . Me, I’m only a little black girl.” Bobbi Hollon, who has sworn never to wash off the blood that splashed on her sandals during the rioting, adds: “Now the whole world is watching Watts.”

How do people make history under conditions designed to dissuade them from intervening in it? Los Angeles blacks are better paid than any others in the United States, but they are also the most separated from the California superopulence that is flaunted all around them. Hollywood, the pole of the global spectacle, is right next door. They are promised that, with patience, they will join in America’s prosperity, but they come to see that this prosperity is not a fixed state but an endless ladder. The higher they climb, the farther they get from the top, because they start off disadvantaged, because they are less qualified and thus more numerous among the unemployed, and finally because the hierarchy that crushes them is not based on economic buying power alone: they are also treated as inherently inferior in every area of daily life by the customs and prejudices of a society in which all human power is based on buying power. Just as the human riches of the American blacks are despised and treated as criminal, monetary riches will never make them completely acceptable in America’s alienated society: individual wealth will only make a rich nigger because blacks as a whole must represent poverty in a society of hierarchized wealth. Every witness noted the cry proclaiming the global significance of the uprising: “This is a black revolution and we want the world to know it!” Freedom Now is the password of all the revolutions of history, but now for the first time the problem is not to overcome scarcity, but to master material abundance according to new principles. Mastering abundance is not just changing the way it is shared out, but totally reorienting it. This is the first step of a vast, all-embracing struggle.

The blacks are not alone in their struggle, because a new proletarian consciousness (the consciousness that they are not at all the masters of their own activities, of their own lives) is developing in America among strata which in their rejection of modern capitalism resemble the blacks. It was, in fact, the first phase of the black struggle which happened to be the signal for the more general movement of contestation that is now spreading. In December 1964 the students of Berkeley, harassed for their participation in the civil rights movement, initiated a strike⁽¹⁾ challenging the functioning of California’s “multiversity” and ultimately calling into question the entire American social system in which they are being programmed to play such a passive role. The spectacle promptly responded with exposés of widespread student drinking, drug use and sexual immorality — the same activities for which blacks have long been reproached. This generation of students has gone on to invent a new form of struggle against the dominant spectacle, the teach-in, a form taken up October 20 in Great Britain at the University of Edinburgh during the Rhodesian crisis. This obviously primitive and imperfect form represents the stage at which people refuse to confine their discussion of problems within academic limits or fixed time periods; the stage when they strive to pursue issues to their ultimate consequences and are thus led to practical activity. The same month tens of thousands of anti-Vietnam war demonstrators appeared in the streets of Berkeley and New York, their cries echoing those of the Watts rioters: “Get out of our district and out of Vietnam!” Becoming more radical, many of the whites are finally going outside the law: “courses” are given on how to hoodwink army recruiting boards (Le Monde, 19 October 1965) and draft cards are burned in front of television cameras. In the affluent society disgust is being expressed for this affluence and for its price. The spectacle is being spat on by an advanced sector whose autonomous activity denies its values. The classical proletariat, to the very extent to which it had been provisionally integrated into the capitalist system, had itself failed to integrate the blacks (several Los Angeles unions refused blacks until 1959); now the blacks are the rallying point for all those who refuse the logic of this integration into capitalism, which is all that the promise of racial integration amounts to. Comfort will never be comfortable enough for those who seek what is not on the market, what in fact the market specifically eliminates. The level attained by the technology of the most privileged becomes an insult, and one more easily grasped and resented than is that most fundamental insult: reification. The Los Angeles rebellion is the first in history to justify itself with the argument that there was no air conditioning during a heat wave.

The American blacks have their own particular spectacle, their own black newspapers, magazines and stars, and if they are rejecting it in disgust as a fraud and as an expression of their humiliation, it is because they see it as a minority spectacle, a mere appendage of a general spectacle. Recognizing that their own spectacle of desirable consumption is a colony of the white one enables them to see more quickly through the falsehood of the whole economic-cultural spectacle. By wanting to participate really and immediately in the affluence that is the official value of every American, they are really demanding the egalitarian actualization of the American spectacle of everyday life — they are demanding that the half-heavenly, half-earthly values of the spectacle be put to the test. But it is in the nature of the spectacle that it cannot be actualized either immediately or equally, not even for the whites. (The blacks in fact function as a perfect spectacular object-lesson: the threat of falling into such wretchedness spurs others on in the rat-race.) In taking the capitalist spectacle at its face value, the blacks are already rejecting the spectacle itself. The spectacle is a drug for slaves. It is designed not to be taken literally, but to be followed from just out of reach; when this separation is eliminated, the hoax is revealed. In the United States today the whites are enslaved to the commodity while the blacks are negating it. The blacks are asking for more than the whites — this is the core of a problem that has no solution except the dissolution of the white social system. This is why those whites who want to escape their own slavery must first of all rally to the black revolt — not, obviously, in racial solidarity, but in a joint global rejection of the commodity and of the state. The economic and psychological distance between blacks and whites enables blacks to see white consumers for what they are, and their justified contempt for whites develops into a contempt for passive consumers in general. The whites who reject this role have no chance unless they link their struggle more and more to that of the blacks, uncovering its most fundamental implications and supporting them all the way. If, with the radicalization of the struggle, such a convergence is not achieved, black nationalist tendencies will be reinforced, leading to the futile interethnic antagonism so characteristic of the old society. Mutual slaughter is the other possible outcome of the present situation, once resignation is no longer viable.

The attempts to build a separatist or pro-African black nationalism are dreams giving no answer to the real oppression. The American blacks have no fatherland. They are in their own country and they are alienated. So are the rest of the population, but the blacks are aware of it. In this sense they are not the most backward sector of American society, but the most advanced. They are the negation at work, “the bad side that makes history by provoking struggles” (The Poverty of Philosophy). Africa has no special monopoly on that.

The American blacks are a product of modern industry, just like electronics or advertising or the cyclotron. And they embody its contradictions. They are the people whom the spectacle paradise must simultaneously integrate and reject, with the result that the antagonism between the spectacle and human activity is totally revealed through them. The spectacle is universal, it pervades the globe just as the commodity does. But since the world of the commodity is based on class conflict, the commodity itself is hierarchical. The necessity for the commodity (and hence for the spectacle, whose role is to inform the commodity world) to be both universal and hierarchical leads to a universal hierarchization. But because this hierarchization must remain unavowed, it is expressed in the form of unavowable, because irrational, hierarchical value judgments in a world of irrational rationalization. It is this hierarchization that creates racisms everywhere. The British Labour government has come to the point of restricting nonwhite immigration, while the industrially advanced countries of Europe are once again becoming racist as they import their subproletariat from the Mediterranean area, developing a colonial exploitation within their own borders. And if Russia continues to be anti-Semitic it is because it continues to be a hierarchical society in which labor must be bought and sold as a commodity. The commodity is constantly extending its domain and engendering new forms of hierarchy, whether between labor leader and worker or between two car-owners with artificially distinguished models. This is the original flaw in commodity rationality, the sickness of bourgeois reason, a sickness which has been inherited by the bureaucratic class. But the repulsive absurdity of certain hierarchies, and the fact that the entire commodity world is directed blindly and automatically to their protection, leads people to see — the moment they engage in a negating practice — that every hierarchy is absurd.

The rational world produced by the Industrial Revolution has rationally liberated individuals from their local and national limitations and linked them on a global scale; but it irrationally separates them once again, in accordance with a hidden logic that finds its expression in insane ideas and grotesque values. Estranged from their own world, people are everywhere surrounded by strangers. The barbarians are no longer at the ends of the earth, they are among the general population, made into barbarians by their forced participation in the worldwide system of hierarchical consumption. The veneer of humanism that camouflages all this is inhuman, it is the negation of human activities and desires; it is the humanism of the commodity, the solicitous care of the parasitical commodity for its human host. For those who reduce people to objects, objects seem to acquire human qualities and truly human manifestations appear as unconscious “animal behavior.” Thus the chief humanist of Los Angeles, William Parker, could say: “They started acting like a bunch of monkeys in a zoo.”

When California authorities declared a “state of insurrection,” the insurance companies recalled that they do not cover risks at that level — they guarantee nothing beyond survival. The American blacks can rest assured that as long as they keep quiet they will in most cases be allowed to survive. Capitalism has become sufficiently concentrated and interlinked with the state to distribute “welfare” to the poorest. But by the very fact that they lag behind in the advance of socially organized survival, the blacks pose the problems of life; what they are really demanding is not to survive but to live. The blacks have nothing of their own to insure; their mission is to destroy all previous forms of private insurance and security. They appear as what they really are: the irreconcilable enemies, not of the great majority of Americans, but of the alienated way of life of the entire modern society. The most industrially advanced country only shows us the road that will be followed everywhere unless the system is overthrown.

Certain black nationalist extremists, to show why they can accept nothing less than a separate nation, have argued that even if American society someday concedes total civil and economic equality, it will never, on a personal level, come around to accepting interracial marriage. That is why this American society itself must disappear — in America and everywhere else in the world. The end of all racial prejudice, like the end of so many other prejudices related to sexual inhibitions, can only lie beyond “marriage” itself, that is, beyond the bourgeois family (which has largely fallen apart among American blacks) — the bourgeois family which prevails as much in Russia as in the United States, both as a model of hierarchical relations and as a structure for a stable inheritance of power (whether in the form of money or of social-bureaucratic status). It is now often said that American youth, after thirty years of silence, are rising again as a force of contestation, and that the black revolt is their Spanish Civil War. This time their “Lincoln Brigades” must understand the full significance of the struggle in which they are engaging and totally support its universal aspects. The Watts “excesses” are no more a political error in the black revolt than the POUM’s May 1937 armed resistance in Barcelona was a betrayal of the anti-Franco war.⁽²⁾ A revolt against the spectacle — even if limited to a single district such as Watts — calls everything into question because it is a human protest against a dehumanized life, a protest of real individuals against their separation from a community that could fulfill their true human and social nature and transcend the spectacle.

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL
December 1965

[TRANSLATOR’S NOTES]

1. The “Free Speech Movement.” See David Lance Goines’s The Free Speech Movement.

2. Lincoln Brigades: Americans volunteers who went to Spain to fight against Franco during the Spanish civil war (1936-1939). POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista): Spanish revolutionary Marxist organization, allied with the anarchists in opposing the machinations of the Stalinists within the anti-Franco camp. It was largely destroyed by the Stalinists in May 1937 through a series of repressions, arrests and assassinations.
     The concluding sentence (“A revolt against the spectacle . . .”) is a détournement from Marx: “A social revolution involves the standpoint of the whole — even if it takes place in only one factory district — because it is a human protest against a dehumanized life, because it proceeds from the standpoint of the single actual individual, because the community against whose separation from himself the individual is reacting is the true community of man, true human nature” (Critical Notes on “The King of Prussia and Social Reform,” 1844).

“Le déclin et la chute de l’économie spectaculaire-marchande” was immediately translated into English and circulated in England and the United States in December 1965. The French version was reprinted in Internationale Situationniste #10 (Paris, March 1966).

This translation by Ken Knabb is from the Situationist International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006). No copyright.

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The BPS website features Ken Knabb’s writings, his translations from Guy Debord and the Situationist International, and a large archive of writings by and about Kenneth Rexroth.
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BUREAU OF PUBLIC SECRETS
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http://www.bopsecrets.org

“Making petrified conditions dance by singing them their own tune.”

The post The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy appeared first on Void Network.

Challenging the danger posed by the coronavirus is surely absurd. But, on the other hand, isn’t it just as absurd that a disturbance in the habitual course of illnesses has become the object of such intense emotional exploitation and mobilizes the same arrogant incompetence that years ago kicked the cloud from Chernobyl out of France? Certainly, we know the facility with which the specter of the apocalypse comes out of it box to seize upon the latest catastrophe, patch together the imagery of a universal deluge and plunge the plowshare of guilt into the sterile soil of Sodom and Gomorrah.

The divine curse served to help power. At least it did during the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, when the Marquis de Pombal, a friend of Voltaire, took advantage of the event to massacre the Jesuits, reconstruct the city according to his conceptions and gleefully liquidate his political rivals through “proto-Stalinist” show trials. Odious though he was, Pombal shouldn’t be insulted by comparing his dictatorial feat with the impoverished measures that democratic totalitarianism is applying globally to the coronavirus epidemic.

It is cynical to impute the propagation of the scourge to the deplorable insufficiency of the medical means being used! For decades the public welfare has been compromised, the hospital sector has paid the costs of a policy that favors financial interests at the expense of the health of the citizens. There is always more money for the banks and fewer and fewer beds and caregivers for the hospitals. What acts of buffoonery can continue to hide the fact that the catastrophic management of catastrophe is inherent in globally dominant financial capitalism, which today is combated globally in the names of life, the planet and the species to be saved?

Without falling into any rehashing of divine punishment (the idea that nature is ridding herself of humanity as if it were an unwelcome and harmful pest), it isn’t useless to recall that for millennia the exploitation of human and terrestrial nature has imposed the dogma of antiphysis, of anti-nature. Eric Postaire’s book, Les épidémie du XXIe siècle, published in 1997,confirms the disastrous effects of persistent denaturation, which is something that I’ve denounced for decades. Evoking the drama of the “mad cow” (foreseen by Rudolf Steiner in the 1920s), Postaire recalls that scientific progress, in addition to disarming us against certain illnesses, can also cause decades of them. In his plea for a responsible approach to epidemics and their treatment, he incriminates what Claude Gudin calls “cash register philosophy” in his preface to the book. He asks, “doesn’t subordinating the health of the population to the laws of profit, to the point of transforming herbivore animals into carnivores, risk causing catastrophes that will be fatal to Nature and Humanity?” We know well that the rulers have already responded with a unanimous YES. But what importance does this have when the NO of the financial interests continues to triumph cynically?

Was the coronavirus really necessary to demonstrate to the most narrow-minded among us that denaturation in the service of profitability has disastrous consequences for universal health, which is managed without distress by a World Organization whose precious statistics compensate for the disappearance of public hospitals? There’s an obvious correlation between the coronavirus and the collapse of global capitalism. It is no less evident that what the coronavirus epidemic covers over and submerges is emotional plague, hysterical fear, panic that both hides the deficiencies of the treatment and perpetuates the evil by frightening the patient. During the great epidemics of the past, the population did penitence and proclaimed their guilt by flagellating themselves. Don’t the managers of global dehumanization have an interest in persuading the people that there is no escape from the miserable lot that is made for them? That all they have is the flagellation of voluntary servitude? The formidable media machine can only rehash the old lie of the heavenly decree, impenetrable, unavoidable, in which crazy money has supplanted the bloody and capricious Gods of the past.

The unleashing of police barbarism upon peaceful demonstrators has amply shown that military law is the only thing that functions efficiently. Today it quarantines women, men and children. Outside: the coffin. Inside: the television, an open window on a closed world! This is a practice that is liable to aggravate existential disease because it gambles on the emotions that have been flayed by anguish and exacerbates the blindness of impotent anger.

But even the lie gives way to general collapse. Governmental and populist cretinization has reached its limits. It cannot deny that an experiment in is progress. Civil disobedience grows and dreams of societies that are radically new because they are radically human. Solidarity frees from their individualist sheepskins those individuals who no longer fear thinking for themselves.

The coronavirus has revealed the bankruptcy of the State. Well, there’s a subject for reflection (at least) by the victims of enforced confinement. At the time of the publication of my Modestes propositions aux grévistes, friends once again showed me the difficulty of following my suggestion for the collective refusal to pay duties, taxes and levies. But then the recognized bankruptcy of the swindler-State attested to an economic and social deterioration that renders absolutely insolvent small- and middle-sized companies, local commerce, those with modest incomes, family-owned farms and even the so-called liberal professions. The collapse of Leviathan has succeeded in convincing people more rapidly than our resolutions to bring it down.

The coronavirus has done even better than that. The cessation of production-caused pollutants has lessened global pollution; millions of people have been spared a programmed death; nature is able to breathe; the dolphins have returned to frolicking in Sardinia; the canals in Venice, purified of mass tourism, now once again contain clear water; the stock market is collapsing. Spain is resolved to nationalize private hospitals, as if it has rediscovered social security, as if the [Spanish] State has recalled the welfare state that it destroyed.

Nothing is assured, everything begins. Utopia still crawls on all fours. Let’s abandon to their heavenly inanity the billions of banknotes and hollow ideas that spin round above our heads. The important thing is to “take care of our affairs ourselves” by letting the wheeler-dealer financial bubble burst and implode. Let us not lack boldness and confidence in ourselves! Our present isn’t the confinement that survival imposes on us; it is the opening to all possibilities. It is due to panic that the oligarchic State is forced to adopt measures that even yesterday it decreed were impossible. It is to the call of life and the earth to be restored that we want to respond. Quarantine is good for reflection. Confinement doesn’t abolish the presence of the street; it reinvents it.

Cum grano salis,

Let me think that the insurrection of everyday life has unexpected therapeutic virtues.

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Translated from the French by NOT BORED! 20 March 2020 http://www.notbored.org/coronavirus.pdf

Raoul Vaneigem: Κορωνοϊός

Είναι καθαρός παραλογισμός το να αμφισβητείς τον κίνδυνο του κορωνοϊού. Από την άλλη πλευρά, μήπως δεν είναι εξίσου παράλογο το γεγονός ότι μια διαταραχή στη συνήθη πορεία ασθενειών γίνεται αντικείμενο μιας τέτοιας συγκινησιακής εκμετάλλευσης, κινητοποιώντας την αλαζονική εκείνη ανικανότητα που είχε διώξει κάποτε έξω από τη Γαλλία το σύννεφο του Τσερνομπίλ;

Βέβαια, γνωρίζουμε με πόση ευκολία το φάσμα της Αποκάλυψης βγαίνει από το κουτί του για να ιδιοποιηθεί τον πρώτο τυχόντα κατακλυσμό, να διορθώσει τα κλασικά εικονογραφημένα του παγκόσμιου κατακλυσμού και να βυθίσει το αλέτρι της ενοχής στο στείρο χώμα των Σοδόμων και των Γομόρρων.

Η θεϊκή κατάρα υποβοηθούσε με χρήσιμο τρόπο την εξουσία. Τουλάχιστον μέχρι τον σεισμό της Λισαβόνας του 1755, τότε που ο μαρκήσιος ντε Πομπάλ, φίλος του Βολταίρου, εκμεταλλεύτηκε τον σεισμό για να σφαγιάσει τους Ιησουίτες, να ανοικοδομήσει την πόλη σύμφωνα με τις αντιλήψεις του και να ξεφορτωθεί με όλη του την άνεση τους πολιτικούς του αντιπάλους στήνωντας μία σειρά από “πρωτο-σταλινικές” δίκες. Δεν θα θέλαμε νε προσβάλουμε τον Πομπάλ, όσο απεχθής κι αν ήταν, με το να συγκρίνουμε το πραξικοπηματικό του κατόρθωμα με τα άθλια μέτρα που εφαρμόζει παγκοσμίως ο δημοκρατικός ολοκληρωτισμός στην επιδημία του κορωνοϊού.

Πόσο κυνικός πρέπει να είσαι για να καταλογίζεις την εξάπλωση της μάστιγας στην αξιοθρήνητη ανεπάρκεια των ιατρικών μέσων που χρησιμοποιούνται! Εδώ και δεκαετίες, τα δημόσια αγαθά πλήττονται, ενώ ο νοσοκομειακός τομέας έχει υποστεί το τίμημα μιας πολιτικής που ευνοεί τα οικονομικά συμφέροντα σε βάρος της υγείας των πολιτών. Υπάρχουν πάντα περισσότερα χρήματα για τις τράπεζες και όλο και λιγότερα κρεβάτια και νοσηλευτές για τα νοσοκομεία. Ποιές γελοιότητες, και για πόσο καιρό ακόμη, θα αποκρύπτουν ότι αυτή η καταστροφική διαχείριση του καταστροφισμού είναι εγγενής στον παγκοσμίως κυρίαρχο χρηματιστικό καπιταλισμό, που σήμερα αμφισβητείται παντού στο όνομα της ζωής, του πλανήτη και των ειδών που πρέπει να σωθούν.

Χωρίς να υιοθετούμε το αναμάσημα της θείας τιμωρίας, αποδεχόμενοι την άποψη ότι η Φύση απαλλάσσεται από τον Άνθρωπο ως ένα ανεπιθύμητο και επιβλαβές παράσιτο, αξίζει να θυμόμαστε ότι για χιλιετίες η εκμετάλλευση της ανθρώπινης φύσης και της γήινης φύσης επέβαλε το δόγμα της αντι-φύσης.

Το βιβλίο του Eric Postaire, Οι επιδημίες του 21ου αιώνα, που δημοσιεύθηκε το 1997, επιβεβαιώνει τις καταστροφικές συνέπειες της επίμονης αλλοίωσης της φύσης, την οποία καταγγέλλω εδώ και δεκαετίες.
Αναφερόμενος στο δράμα των “τρελών αγελάδων” (που προέβλεψε ο Rudolf Steiner ήδη από το 1920), ο συγγραφέας υπενθυμίζει ότι εκτός από την αδυναμία μας να αντιμετωπίζουμε ορισμένες ασθένειες, συνειδητοποιούμε ότι η ίδια η επιστημονική πρόοδος μπορεί να τις προκαλέσει. Συνηγορώντας υπέρ μιας υπεύθυνης προσέγγισης των επιδημιών και της διαχείρησής τους, κατηγορεί αυτό που ο Claude Gudin, στον πρόλογο, αποκαλεί τη “φιλοσοφία της ταμειακής”. Θέτει το ερώτημα: “‘Οταν η υγεία του πληθυσμού υπάγεται στους νόμους του κέρδους, μέχρι το σημείο να μετατρέπουμε φυτοφάγα ζώα σε σαρκοφάγα, μήπως δεν κινδυνεύουμε έτσι να προκαλούμε θανατηφόρες καταστροφές για τη Φύση και την Ανθρωπότητα;”

Οι κυβερνώντες, όπως γνωρίζουμε, έχουν ήδη απαντήσει με ένα ομόφωνο ΝΑΙ. Τι σημασία έχει, εφόσον το ΟΧΙ των χρηματιστικών συμφερόντων εξακολουθεί να θριαμβεύει κυνικά;

Χρειαζόταν ο κορωνοϊός για να αποδείξουμε στους πιο στενόμυαλους ότι η αλλοίωση της φύσης στο βωμό του κέρδους έχει καταστροφικές συνέπειες πάνω στην οικουμενική υγεία -αυτήν που διαχειρίζεται αδιαλειπώς ένας Παγκόσμιος Οργανισμός, των οποίων τα πολύτιμα στατιστικά στοιχεία αντισταθμίζουν την εξαφάνιση των δημόσιων νοσοκομείων; Υπάρχει μια προφανής συσχέτιση μεταξύ του κοροναϊού και της κατάρρευσης του παγκόσμιου καπιταλισμού. Την ίδια στιγμή, άλλο τόσο προφανές είναι ότι αυτό που καλύπτει και κατακλύζει την επιδημία του κορωναϊού είναι μια συναισθηματική πανώλη, ένας υστερικός φόβος, ένας πανικός που κρύβει τις ελλείψεις της διαχείρησης και ταυτόχρονα διαιωνίζει το κακό τρελαίνοντας τον ασθενή. Κατά τη διάρκεια των μεγάλων επιδημιών πανώλης του παρελθόντος, οι άνθρωποι έκαναν μετάνοιες και διακήρυτταν την ενοχή τους μαστιγώνοντας τους εαυτούς τους. Μήπως δεν έχουν και οι διαχειριστές της παγκόσμιας απανθρωποποίησης συμφέρον να πείσουν τους ανθρώπους ότι δεν υπάρχει διέξοδος από την άθλια μοίρα που τους επιφυλάσσεται; Ότι τους έχει μείνει μόνο το μαστίγιο της εθελοντικής σκλαβιάς;

Το μόνο που κάνει η τρομερή μηντιακή μηχανή είναι να αναμασά το παλιό ψέμα της ουράνιας, ανεξιχνίαστης, αναπόφευκτης προσταγής όπου το τρελό χρήμα έχει αντικαταστήσει τους αιμοδιψείς και ιδιόρρυθμους θεούς του παρελθόντος. Η αστυνομική βαρβαρότητα που εξαπολύθηκε κατά των ειρηνικών διαδηλωτών απέδειξε με το παραπάνω ότι ο στρατιωτικός νόμος ήταν το μόνο πράγμα που λειτουργούσε αποτελεσματικά. Σήμερα υποβάλλει τις γυναίκες, τους άνδρες και τα παιδιά σε καραντίνα. Έξω, το φέρετρο, μέσα η τηλεόραση, ένα παράθυρο ανοίχτό σε έναν κλειστό κόσμο!

Πρόκειται για την διαμόρφωση μιας κατάστασης ικανής να επιδεινώσει την υπαρξιακή δυσφορία ποντάροντας πάνω σε τσακισμένα από το άγχος συναισθήματα, οξύνοντας την τύφλωση του αδύναμου θυμού. Αλλά ακόμα και το ψέμα υποχωρεί απέναντι στη γενική κατάρρευση. Η κρατική και λαϊκιστική παραγωγή κρετίνων άγγιξε τα όριά της. Δεν μπορεί να αρνηθεί ότι ένα πείραμα βρίσκεται σε εξέλιξη. Η πολιτική ανυπακοή εξαπλώνεται και ονειρεύεται κοινωνίες ριζικά νέες, επειδή θα είναι ριζικά ανθρώπινες.

Η αλληλεγγύη απελευθερώνει από την ατομικιστική τους προβιά άτομα που δεν φοβούνται πλέον να σκέφτονται από μόνα τους. Ο κορωνοϊός αποκάλυψε την χρεοκοπία του κράτους. Ορίστε ένα θέμα που προσφέρεται για προβληματισμό για τα θύματα του καταναγκαστικού περιορισμού. ‘Οταν είχαν δημοσιευτεί οι “Ταπεινές μου προτάσεις προς τους απεργούς”, κάποιοι φίλοι μού είχαν επιστήσει την προσοχή στις δυσκολίες που παρουσιάζει η προσφυγή στη συλλογική άρνηση, την οποία υποστήριζα, ως προς την καταβολή φόρων, δασμών και παρακρατήσεων. Να όμως που τώρα η αποδεδειγμένη χρεοκοπία του κράτους-απατεώνα μαρτυρεί την οικονομική και κοινωνική αποσύνθεση που καθιστά απολύτως αφερέγγυες τις μικρές και μεσαίες επιχειρήσεις, το τοπικό εμπόριο, τα χαμηλά εισοδήματα, τους οικογενειακούς αγρότες, και ακόμη και τα λεγόμενα ελεύθερα επαγγέλματα.

Η κατάρρευση του Λεβιάθαν κατάφερε να πείσει ταχύτερα από τις προσπάθειές μας για να το ρίξουμε. Ο κορωναϊός κατάφερε ακόμη κι άλλα. Παύοντας την βλαβερές συνέπειες της αχαλίνωτης παραγωγής, μειώνει την παγκόσμια ρύπανση, γλύτωνει εκατομμύρια ανθρώπους από έναν προγραμματισμένο θάνατο, η φύση αναπνέει, τα δελφίνια επιστρέφουν στη Σαρδηνία, τα κανάλια της Βενετίας απαλλαγμένα από τον μαζικό τουρισμό ξαναβρίσκουν ένα νερό καθαρό, το χρηματιστήριο καταρρέει.
Η Ισπανία αποφασίζει να εθνικοποιήσει ιδιωτικά νοσοκομεία, σαν να ανακαλύπτει εκ νέου την κοινωνική ασφάλιση, σαν το κράτος να θυμάται το το κράτος πρόνοιας που κατέστρεψε.

Τίποτα δεν είναι δεδομένο, όλα τώρα αρχίζουν. Η ουτοπία σέρνεται ακόμα στα τέσσερα. Ας εγκαταλείψουμε στην ουράνια ασημαντότητά τους τα δισεκατομμύρια τραπεζογραμμάτια και τις κενές- ασήμαντες ιδέες που κάνουν κύκλους πάνω από τα κεφάλια μας. Το σημαντικό είναι να “ασχοληθούμε εμείς οι ίδιοι με τις υποθέσεις μας” αφήνοντας την κομπιναδόρικη φούσκα να διαλυθεί και να εκραγεί. Ας προσέξουμε να μη μας λείψει η τόλμη και η αυτοπεποίθηση! Το παρόν μας δεν είναι ο περιορισμός που μας επιβάλλει η επιβίωση, είναι το άνοιγμα σε όλες τις δυνατότητες. Πανικόβλητο, το ολιγαρχικό κράτος αναγκάζεται να υιοθετήσει μέτρα που χθες ακόμα διακήρυττε πως ήταν αδύνατα. Εμείς θέλουμε να ανταποκριθούμε στο αίτημα της αποκατάστασης της ζωής και της γης. Η καραντίνα ευνοεί τη σκέψη. Ο περιορισμός δεν καταργεί τη σημασία του δρόμου, αλλά την επανεφεύρει.

Επιτρέψτε μου να σκέφτομαι, cum grano salis, ότι

η εξέγερση της καθημερινότητας έχει ανυποψίαστες θεραπευτικές αρετές.

__________________

To άρθρο αυτό προέρχεται από μία συλλογή κειμένων και συνεντεύξεων που θα δημοσιεύονταν τον Απρίλη από τις εκδόσεις Grevis με τίτλο Η εξέγερση της καθημερινής ζωής.
Ο Ραούλ Βανεγκέμ είναι βέλγος συγγραφέας και φιλόσοφος, πρώην μέλος και θεωρητικός της Καταστασιακής Διεθνούς.

The post Raoul Vaneigem: CORONAVIRUS (english & greek translation) appeared first on Void Network.

(The text published in french language at “A contretemps” at 17 November 2019).

The sudden attacks of freedom on the suffocating capitalist hydra, constantly make the epicenter of the seismic disturbances fluctuate. The territories of the whole world affected by the system of private benefits are exposed to the outburst of insurrectional movements. Consciousness is forced to run after successive waves of events, reacting to constant, paradoxically predictable and unexpected shocks.

Two realities struggle against each other in the face of the violence. One is the reality of lying. Taking advantage of technological progress, you try to manipulate public opinion for the benefit of established power. The other is the reality of daily life of the population.

On the one hand, there are the hollow words of corporate jargon which show the importance of numbers, surveys and statistics; which teem with false debates whose proliferation serves to hide the real problems: existential and social demands. The media windows-screens of deceit spill out each day numerous tricks and insignificant conflicts of interest which are of no interest to us, but whose negative consequences affect us. Their profitable wars of devastation are not ours; they have no other purpose than to dissuade us from waging the only war that concerns us, the war against the inhumanity prevalent in the world.

On the same side, according to the absurd truth of leaders, things are clear: to claim the rights of the human being is characteristic of anti-democratic violence. Democracy would then consist of repressing the people, throwing at them a horde of police officers who, by developing the impunity guaranteed by the government and the candidates of the opposition eager to succeed them, incites fascist inducing behavior. Just imagine the songs of the media zombies if it were true that the self-immolation of a victim of impoverishment by fire would lead to the fire of the system responsible for the poverty!

On the other hand, the reality experienced by the people is also clear. We will never admit that the meaningless of poorly paid work, that the bureaucratic pressure that increases interest rates and decreases the amount of pensions and social conquests, that the wage pressure which reduces life to strict survival, can be reduced for business transactions. The lived reality is not a number, it is a feeling of unworthiness, it is the feeling of being nothing in the claws of the State, a monster which shrinks like the skin of a shoe before draining of international embezzlement money.

Well, in the confrontation between these two realities – the one that imposes the fetishism of money and the one that speaks in the name of life – a spark, often tiny, came to light the fuse.

There is no futility today, however small, that is not capable of unleashing the violence contained in repressed life, in the life determined to break everything that threatens to extinguish it.

Secular inertia and lethargy, under the aegis of the ancient “bread and circus” recipe, are the basis of the tremendous power of voluntary servitude. Denounced in the 16th century by La Boétie, it remains our most ruthless enemy. By attacking us from the inside, voluntary servitude promotes an inclination among many that functions as if it were a drug: the will to exercise power, to assume the role of guide. Frequently, the morbidity of the authority of a few has infected the libertarian media, so we should congratulate the determination of the yellow vests and other insurgents of everyday life to constantly evoke their rejection of leaders, of self-appointed delegates, of masters of thought and of pond frogs of the holy water of politics and labour unionism.

Free are those who are happy to die in peace while waiting for death in the combined comfort of the coffin and of television, but we will not let their self-spoiling infect over our will to live.

We want the sovereignty of the human being, no more no less.

Impoverishment knocks on doors with increasing violence, threatening to bring them down. The hedonism of the recent past which crushed us with the consumerist and government slogan is over: “Take advantage of today, tomorrow will be worse!” The worst is already today, especially if we continue to welcome it. We must stop believing in the omnipotence of capitalism and the fetishism of money. We have noticed that the great macabre farce that makes the world dance is the result of a sordid motivation, that of short-term profit, that of the absurd rapacity of a bankrupt merchant scratching at the back of the drawers in the search for more.

I’m not talking about hope. It is only the lure of despair. I am referring to all the regions of the world where an insurrection of everyday life – call it what you like – is trying to dismantle the dictatorship of private profit and to overthrow the States which impose it on the people they claim to represent. What we want is not for tomorrow, but for today, as caregivers, nurses, emergency doctors, paramedics and doctors who deal with the economic management that dehumanises the health care sector so well expressed [in the ongoing general strike in france].

The system of exploitation of terrestrial and human nature goes beyond all horizons. The mantle of profitability, at all costs, closes off all expressions of the generosity of life and the human feeling that promotes its practice.

Obviously, the exploiters and the exploited are convinced that the pot is about to explode. Violence is unavoidable. The problem does not lie with it. The approach to resolve the matter without ambiguity is based on an alternative.

Will we tolerate the social explosion leading to a state of endemic civil war, a chaos of revenge and hatred which will ultimately only benefit multinational mafias, already at liberty to continue with impunity and even to destroy themselves with their lucrative desertification project?

Or are we going to create micro-societies freed from the tyranny of the State and commodities, federated territories where the intelligence of individuals can get rid of this herd individualism in search of a supreme guide who will lead them to the slaughterhouse? Are we finally going to take the reins of our own destiny and outline a clear plan for this social jungle, where the beasts of burden have no more freedom than that to choose the prey which will devour them?

In 1888, Octave Mirabeau wrote: “Lambs go to the slaughterhouse. They say nothing and expect nothing. But at least they don’t vote for the butcher who will kill them or the bourgeois who will eat them. Worse than animals, more crowded than sheep, the voter chooses his butcher and chooses his bourgeois. S/he made revolutions to conquer the right to do so.”

Have they not transformed you from generation to generation with the same indescribable currency: heads, the baton of order; tails, the humanitarian lie?

There is no “vote of the lesser evil”, there is only a totalitarian democracy, which only the direct democracy exercised by the people and for the people will revoke. I was amused by the passage of a slogan which, however rough it may be, calls for a further reflection: “Macron, Le Pen, Mélenchon, the same fight of fools! “(I would have preferred “the same fight of capons”; but the rejection of all forms of power and dialogue with the State is one of those little pleasures from which come the great waves of individual and collective enjoyment).

Autonomy, self-organisation, self-defence

The authorities in power will not tolerate the people being freed from their tyranny. We must prepare for a long struggle. That to be carried out against voluntary servitude will be such a struggle. The only foundation that despotism can take advantage of is the acrimony over security of the resigned, it is the suicidal resentment of a supposedly silent majority who screams their hatred of life.

The best defense is always offensive. To this principle, amply demonstrated by military tradition, I would like to substitute that of openness, because, to the advantage of breaking up of the encirclement is added the pleasure of breaking up the barracks in which we find ourselves.

The openness to life, we see it at work in the fierce determination of the current insurrections. Even if some of them die out, they start again more powerfully. We can see it in the festive nature of the protests which endure, despite the fact that they are met with the blindness, the deafness, the repressive rage of governments. It was on the basis of this openness that I spoke of insurgent pacifism.

Insurrectionary pacifism is neither peaceful, in the bleating sense of the term, nor insurrectional, if one understands by this the aberrations of urban and Guevarist guerrillas.

I have neither the vocation of a warrior nor of a martyr. I leave it to life and its poetry to overcome opposites so that they do not become nuisances, so that they escape the Manichean duality of pros and cons. I rely on the creativity of individuals to invent a revolution of which there is no example in the past. The disarray and the uncertainties of a civilization which is born have nothing in common with the disarray of a civilization which has only the certainty of dying.

Philosophers, sociologists, experts of thought, spare us your endless discussions on the malignity of capitalism which makes its agony profitable. Everyone agrees on this point, even the capitalists. The real issues, however, have not been addressed. These are those of the base, those of villages and urban neighbourhoods, those of our own body, which is all the same, it must be remembered, the real decision maker of our destiny, right?

The more the struggles spread worldwide, the more their meaning gains in radicality, in depth, in lived experience, the more they dispense with militant engagement, the more they mock intellectuals, specialists in subversive or reactionary manipulation (because manipulation deals with both like two sides of the same coin). It is both in their existential experience and in their social function that individuals discover themselves on the ground where their aspiration to live begins to undermine and clear away the wall which counting of profits confronts them with, as if their fate stopped there.

No, we can no longer speak of abstract man, the only one recognised by statistics, budgetary calculations, the rhetoric of those who – laymen or religious, humanists or racists, progressives or conservatives – who have others beaten, blinded, imprisoned, massacred, while, lurking in their cowardly ghettos, they count on the arrogant cretinism of money to ensure their impunity and their security.

The dictatorship of profit is an aggression against the body. Entrusting in life the care of immunising us against the financial canker that corrupts our flesh implies a poetic and united struggle. Nothing like the fires of the joy of living to reduce the morbidity of the world to ashes! The revolution has therapeutic virtues, unsuspected until today.

Ecologists, why bother bawling at States for climate improvement when the same States taunt you by polluting more every day, and when it is urgent to act on a field where the questions have nothing to do with intellectual niceties. Questions such as:

How to move from land poisoned by the food industry to its renaturation by permaculture?

How to ban pesticides without harming the peasant who, trapped by Monsanto, Total and others, destroys her/his health by destroying that of others? How to rebuild on a new basis small village and neighborhood schools that the State has ruined and banned to promote concentration camp-like education?

How to boycott harmful and useless products that advertising harassment tells us to buy?

How to constitute local investment banks where the currency of exchange will compensate opportunely for monetary collapse and the planned financial crash?

How to cut short the tax levies that the State allocates to bank fraud, and undertake to invest them in the self-financing of local and regional projects?

Above all, how to spread everywhere the principle of a gratuitousness that life claims by nature and that the fetishism of money distorts. Free trains and public transport, free healthcare, free housing and self-construction, gradual free local craft and food production.

Utopia? Is there a worse utopia than the hodgepodge of absurd and deleterious projects unpacked, before the tired eyes of television viewers, these talented false actors who stir the specter of their wars of traveling salesmen, endlessly reiterating the antics of the combat of chiefs, veiling the real existential and social questions under false debates, overshadowing state terrorism by a terrorism of trivialities where suicidal madness grows with pauperisation and an increasingly unbreathable ambient air?

Have we not realised enough that, in their diversity, even in their divergences, the yellow vests and protest movements formed a formidable pressure group capable of boycotting, blocking, paralysing, destroying everything that pollutes, poisons, impoverishes, threatens our life and our environment? To make us underestimate our power and our creativity comes from the democratic mechanisms of state and market tyranny. More than its gendarmes, the illusory force of the State rests on a propaganda effect which urges us at every moment to give up the poetic power which is in us, this force of life which no tyranny will overcome.

Now, during this time …In Chile, the fight against the vermin which proliferates on the corpse of Pinochet has rekindled the awareness that everything must start from the base, that the representatives of the people are not the people, that the individualist manipulated by the gregarious spirit is not the individual capable of thinking for her/himself and taking the side of life against the side of money that kills. It is necessary to leave to the people the conquest of an intelligence which belongs to them and which the various forms of power endeavor to remove from them.

The same is true in Algeria, Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq. I trust Rojava to transform its temporary retirement into an offensive. The Zapatistas, for their part, responded to the socialist arguments of the socialist Lopez Obrador by increasing the number of their bases (caracoles) and their Councils of good government, where decisions are made by the people and for the people.

The obstinate demand for a democracy in Hong-Kong oscillates between on the one hand a blind anger, ready to be satisfied with a parliamentarism everywhere else put into questioned, and on the other hand a lucid anger which shakes and makes tremble by its persistence the gigantic pyramid of the totalitarian Chinese regime (which worries about the threat of a financial crash). Who knows? The ivy permeates everywhere, and the insurgent past of Shanghai is not far away.

Sudan shakes off the yoke of tyranny and military power, Iran falters. Lebanon is a wake-up call for Hezbollah and for Islamism, the defrocking of which no longer obscures the politico-oil objective. Algeria does not want a government face-lift. Iraq discovers that social reality outweighs the importance given to religious rivalries. There remain the Catalans, the only ones who want a state when the “coldest of cold monsters” is riddled with arrows everywhere. But it is not impossible that the separatists, engaged in an impasse by the standoff opposing the Madrid state to the no less statist Generalitat, suddenly breathe the ruffles of the Franco corpse that the nationalist spirit has taken out of its cemeteries. So it is not impossible that the memory of the libertarian communities of the revolution of 1936, where real independence was forged, will come back to them before the Communist Party and its ally, the Catalan State, crush them.

It’s only a dream but life is a dream and we have entered an era where poetry is the passage from dream to reality, a passage which marks the end of the nightmare and its valley of tears.

Opening a vital space to those paralyse the dismay and anxiety of the future, is it not poetic practice that makes the insolent novelty of the insurrection of everyday life? Do we not see it in the loss of militancy, in the erosion of this old military reflex which multiplies the little chiefs and their frightened herds?

Under the diversity of its pretexts, the only demand that is expressed today without reservation is full and whole life.

Who would be wrong? We are not in the tumult of foreseeable or unexpected revolts, we are in a revolutionary process. The world changes base, an old civilization collapses, a new civilization appears. Compassionate mentalities and archaic behaviors may be perpetuated under an ersatz of modernity, a new Renaissance is nevertheless emerging within a history whose inhumanity collapses into chaos before our eyes. And these eyes are slowly opening. They discover in women, men and children a genius to innocently experiment with incredible innovations, unusual energies, forms of resistance to death, universes that no imagination had dared to set in motion in the past.

Here we are! At the beginning of everything!

Raoul VANEIGEM, 17 novembre 2019

English translation: Autonomies.org

The post Raul Vaneigem: Here we are! At the beginning of everything! appeared first on Void Network.

The French political theorist, activist and poet Ivan Chtcheglov 
was following his Ukrainian father as a revolutionary of his time. His father, Vladimir Chtcheglov, was sentenced to two years imprisonment following the 1905 Revolution. After he was released, Vladimir Chtcheglov left the Russian Empire. In 1910, Vladimir and his wife moved to Paris where he worked as a taxi driver. He took part in the 1911 driver strike.

Ivan – the French born son – became as a young man member of the Situationists International and as such he was the inventor of the “dérive”* (drifting) with his manifesto “Formulary for a New Urbanism”, before he tried to blow up the Eifel Tower because its reflected light was shining into his attic room and was keeping him awake.

Chtcheglov’s unforgettable line was that ‘dreams spring from reality and are realized in it’. His work was an experiment in the avant-garde. his technique echoes the improvisation that is evident in his working methods.

His text has a wonderful lyrical quality to it.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

*DERIVE or …Drifting:
One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive or drifting, a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.

In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.

Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

New Urbanism

In 1953, at age nineteen, Ivan Chtcheglov wrote the manifest “Formulary for a New Urbanism”, outlining how a city and modern city life has to be in order to achieve the most quality of life.
The “Formulary for a New Urbanism” illustrates how he envisioned the perfect city life:

 “Everyone will, so to speak, live in their own personal “cathedrals.” There will be rooms more conducive to dreams than any drug, and houses where one cannot help but love. […]”

“The districts of this city could correspond to the whole spectrum of diverse feelings that one encounters by chance in everyday life. […]”

“The main activity of the inhabitants will be CONTINUOUS DRIFTING. The changing of landscapes from one hour to the next will result in total disorientation.” […]

“Couples will no longer pass their nights in the home where they live and receive guests, which is nothing but a banal social custom. The chamber of love will be more distant from the center of the city: it will naturally recreate for the partners a sense of exoticism in a locale less open to light, more hidden, so as to recover the atmosphere of secrecy.” […]

Due to these elaborations, he is considered the founder of the dérive.
The manifest served as inspiration for many artists, urbanists and architects worldwide.

The Haçienda

The “Formulary for a New Urbanism” included the phrase “The Haçienda must be built”, and became somewhat of a pop culture phenomenon, which in the eighties influenced the British music and television personality Tony Wilson in naming his Manchester acid house and rave nightclub “The Haçienda”…

Blow up the Eiffel Tower
 
In 1959, Chtcheglov was sharing an attic loft in Paris with his friend Henry de Béarn, and every night the light from the Eiffel Tower would shine in their eyes. Instead of opting for curtains, they decided to blow it up – not as a political act, not as a nihilist affirmation, but simply because it kept them awake. They were arrested on their way to the Eiffel Tower as they stopped at a billiard bar on Rue Mouffetard, with backpacks full of dynamite they had stolen from a nearby construction site. He had told everyone around him about his plan, and while some did not take his attempt too seriously, his wife arranged for him to be committed to a mental institution following his arrest, where he was subdued with insulin and shock therapy, and remained for five years. He died in April 1998.


source:
http://www.inenart.eu/?p=13830

The post “Find your Cathedral – blow up the Eiffel Tower” a tribute to Ivan Chtcheglov by Nora Sophie appeared first on Void Network.

1

The traditional goal of aesthetics is to produce, by means of art, impressions of certain past elements of life in circumstances where those elements are lacking or absent, in such a way that those elements escape the disorder of appearances subject to the ravages of time. The degree of aesthetic success is thus measured by a beauty that is inseparable from duration, and that even goes so far as pretensions of eternity. The goal of the situationists is immediate participation in a passionate abundance of life by means of deliberately arranged variations of ephemeral moments. The success of these moments can reside in nothing other than their fleeting effect. The situationists consider cultural activity in its totality as an experimental method for constructing everyday life, a method that can and should be continually developed with the extension of leisure and the withering away of the division of labor (beginning with the division of artistic labor).

2

Art can cease being a report about sensations and become a direct organization of more advanced sensations. The point is to produce ourselves rather than things that enslave us.

3

Mascolo is right in saying (in Le Communisme) that the reduction of the work day by the dictatorship of the proletariat is “the most certain sign of the latter’s revolutionary authenticity.” Indeed, “if man is a commodity, if he is treated as a thing, if human relations are relations of thing to thing, this is because it is possible to buy his time.” But Mascolo is too quick to conclude that “the time of a man freely employed” is always well spent, and that “the purchase of time is the sole evil.” There can be no freely spent time until we possess the modern tools for the construction of everyday life. The use of such tools will mark the leap from a utopian revolutionary art to an experimental revolutionary art.

4

An international association of situationists can be seen as a coalition of workers in an advanced sector of culture, or more precisely as a coalition of all those who demand the right to work on a project that is obstructed by present social conditions; hence as an attempt at organizing professional revolutionaries in culture.

5

We are excluded from real control over the vast material powers of our time. The communist revolution has not yet occurred and we are still living within the confines of decomposing old cultural superstructures. Henri Lefebvre rightly sees that this contradiction is at the heart of a specifically modern discordance between the progressive individual and the world, and he terms the cultural tendency based on this discordance “revolutionary-romantic.” The inadequacy of Lefebvre’s conception lies in the fact that he makes the mere expression of this discordance a sufficient criterion for revolutionary action within culture. Lefebvre abandons in advance any experimentation involving profound cultural change, contenting himself with mere awareness of possibilities that are as yet impossible (because they are still too remote), an awareness that can be expressed in any sort of form within the framework of cultural decomposition.

6

Those who want to supersede the old established order in all its aspects cannot cling to the disorder of the present, even in the sphere of culture. In culture as in other areas, it is necessary to struggle without waiting any longer for some concrete appearance of the moving order of the future. The possibility of this ever-changing new order, which is already present among us, devalues all expressions within existing cultural forms. If we are ever to arrive at authentic direct communication (in our working hypothesis of higher cultural means: the construction of situations), we must bring about the destruction of all the forms of pseudocommunication. The victory will go to those who are capable of creating disorder without loving it.

7

In the world of cultural decomposition we can test our strength but never use it. The practical task of overcoming our discordance with this world, that is, of surmounting its decomposition by some more advanced constructions, is not romantic. We will be “revolutionary romantics,” in Lefebvre’s sense, precisely to the degree that we fail.


GUY DEBORD 
1958


“Thèses sur la révolution culturelle” originally appeared in Internationale Situationniste #1 (Paris, June 1958). This translation by Ken Knabb is from the Situationist International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006). No copyright.

source: 
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/1.cultural-revolution.htm

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“To deny society, one must attack its language.” – Guy Debord.

The impossible is a closed universe. Nevertheless, we possess the key to it and, as we’ve suspected for millennia, its door opens on a field of infinite possibilities. More than ever, this field belongs to us, to explore and cultivate. The key is neither magic nor symbolic. The ancient Greeks called it “poetry,” from the verb poiein, to construct, to fashion, to create.
Ever since market civilization instaurated the reign of princes and priests – the lamentable remains of whom continue to swarm upon God’s cadaver – the dogma of the innate weakness and deficiency of men and women hasn’t ceased to be taught, at the expense of creativity, which is the human faculty par excellence. Do not the laws of power and profit condemn the child to age prematurely by teaching him or her to work, to consume, and to exhibit him or herself on the market of slaves, where competitive craftiness stifles the intelligence of the heart and solidarity?
We are exposed to a constant denaturation in which life is emptied of its substance, while the necessity of survival is reduced to the animalistic quest for subsistence. The uncertain right to existence is acquired at the cost of a predatory comportment that converts fear into cash and profits from it.
While socially useful work – natural agriculture, schools, hospitals, metallurgy, transportation – becomes rarefied and degraded, parasitical work – subject to financial imperatives – governs the States and peoples [of the world] in the name of a financial bubble that is condemned to implode. Fear reigns and responds to fear. The populist Right recuperates working class [populaire] anger. It designates interchangeable scapegoats – Jews, Arabs, Muslims, the unemployed, homosexuals, people from Mediterranean countries, intellectuals, outsiders – and thus prevents attacks on a system that threatens the entire planet. At the same time, the populist Left channels indignation into demonstrations, the spectacular character of which completely dispenses with any veritable subversive project. The nec plus ultra of radicalism consists in burning the banks and organizing gladiator combats between cops and rioters when such combat in the arena weakens the solidity of the banking-swindling system and the States that unanimously take on base works.
Fear, resignation, fatalism and voluntary servitude everywhere darken the minds of individuals and rally crowds to the heels of the tribunes and representative of the people, who draw from their cretinization the last profits to be had from an unsteady power.
How to struggle against the weight of the obscurantism that – from conservatism to the spiteful and impotent revolt of Leftism – maintains the lethargy of despair, ally of all the tyrannies, no matter how revolting, ridiculous or absurd they are? To have done with the diverse forms of gregariousness, whose bleating and screaming punctuate the route to the slaughterhouse, I do not see any other way than reviving the dialogue that is at the heart of each person’s existence, the dialogue between the desire to live and the objurgations of a programmed death.
By what aberration do we consent to pay for the goods – water, vegetables, air, fertile earth, renewable and free sources of energy – that nature provides us with? By what self-contempt do we judge it impossible to blow away – with the living breath of human aspirations – the economy that programs its own annihilation by monopolizing and sacking the world? How to continue to believe that money is indispensible when it pollutes everything it touches?
It is in the logic of things that the exploiters attempt to convince the exploited of their ineluctable inferiority. But what’s scandalous is that people who revolt and revolutionaries allow themselves to be imprisoned in the artificial circle of the impossible. I do not know how much time will pass before the bronze tables of the law of profit are broken into pieces, but a truly human society will not exist unless the dogma of our incapability to found a society on the true richness of being (the faculty of creating oneself and recreating the world) is broken.
Perhaps it would be indispensible to repeat the following tirelessly, until these life-bearing words create an opening in the petrified forest where frozen and gelatinous words consecrate the power of a coldly profitable death: yes, it is possible to have done with corrupt democracy by instaurating direct democracy; yes, it is possible to push further the experiment of the Spanish libertarian collectives of 1936 and put generalized self-management to work; yes, it is possible to recreate abundance and what’s free by refusing to pay and putting an end to the reign of money; yes, it is possible to get rid of racketeering [affairisme] by strictly adopting the recommendation “We will take care of our affairs ourselves”; and, yes, it is possible to pass beyond the diktats of the State, the threats of the financial mafias, and the [demands of] political predators of every stripe.
If we do not exit from economic reality by constructing a human reality, we will once more allow market cruelty to rage and perpetuate itself.
The battle that unfolds, on the terrain of everyday life, between the desire to live fully and the slow agony of an existence supported by work, money and rotten pleasures is the same battle that attempts to preserve the quality of our environment against the ravages of the market economy. The schools, natural agricultural products, public transportation networks, hospitals, health clinics, herbal medicines, water, invigorating air, renewable and free energy-sources, and socially-useful goods (made by workers cynically despoiled of their production) belong to us. Let’s stop paying for what is ours.
Life surpasses [prime] the economy. The liberty of the living revokes the liberties of commerce. It will henceforth be on this terrain that the battle is fought.

(Published in L’Impossible #2, April 2012. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! on 16 May 2012.)

source: http://www.notbored.org/beyond-the-impossible.html

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