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!

_____

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.

____

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.

(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

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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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