Monday, December 15, 2014

"The End of Money" by Daniel Pinchbeck























The current economic crisis may be another bump on capitalism’s always dizzying terrain, or it may signal epochal changes. The crisis of the financial markets has taken on gargantuan proportions.

 This spring saw the emergency sale of Bear Stearns, the fifth largest financial institution on Wall Street, to JP Morgan for a paltry sum by “Master of the Universe” standards, including its flashy corporate headquarters and thousands of employees. Even this sale only came about because the US Federal Reserve agreed to cover the risks of exposure to creditors, pushing the financial costs onto US taxpayers. Despite this bailout and other interventions in the supposed “free market,” the financial system is still reeling. Credit liquidity has disappeared, causing shockwaves in student loans and other areas.

With the increase in fuel prices and contracting supply of basic resources such as food and water, many commentators think far worse is still to come. Dmitry Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse (New Society Press) argues that the United States is headed for an imminent economic meltdown that will be as devastating as the fall of the USSR in the 1990s: “Try to form a picture in your mind: it is a superpower, it is huge, it is powerful, and it is going to come crashing down,” he writes. “You or me trying to do something about it would have the same effect as you or me wriggling our toes at a tsunami.”

“Life without money is unthinkable”

According to Orlov, an engineer and peak oil theorist, the causes of this crash include ideological gridlock, the entrenched corruption of our corporate state, the massive debt piled on by heedless US policies, and our utter dependence on a rapidly diminishing supply of fossil fuels. Predicting mass bankruptcy, hyperinflation, and resource shortages, Orlov recommends stockpiling items that can be bartered on the black market, such as razors, condoms, and liquor, strengthening local communities, and learning how to grow your own food. “For most people in the US, rich or poor, life without money is unthinkable,” he notes. “They may want to give this problem some thought, ahead of time.”

While the fire-sale of Bear Stearns was being arranged, I was at the Left Forum at Cooper Union in New York, an annual gathering of Leftist academics and organizers from around the world. The Left Forum featured over 100 panels on a range of subjects, from water privatization, CIA torture, to the leftward shift of South America, and many other topics. I had been invited to speak on a panel about indigenous cultures, consciousness, and social transformation – the only place at the Left Forum where social movements were even summarily discussed in relation to indigenous cultures who live “with” the earth, and not “on” it, as my fellow panelist, Tiokasin, a radio host at WBAI and a Lakota, put it, and non-ordinary states of awareness were given a nod.

During a panel on the “Decline of the Dollar,” I was struck by a comment from David Harvey – an eminence grise among Leftist academics, the esteemed author of Limits to Capital and other works – who noted that Wall Street bonuses in January amounted to an astounding $36 billion, despite the heedless actions of the traders and investment houses that caused the implosion of the financial markets. At the same time, due to the subprime mortgage meltdown, over a million people have already seen their homes foreclosed, with nearly two million more foreclosures coming in the near-future, leading to more than three million US citizens deprived of their largest and most central asset. What Harvey noted is that, if we ignore the “fetishized mystical language” of the financial elite, “The loss of assets of those three million people is where those $36 billion of bonuses came from.”

Apparently, another 8 million-plus homes-more than 10 percent of the homes owned in the US-are now valued at less than the outstanding mortgages owed. What this means is that many of those mortgage-holders may soon find it more sensible to walk away from their property – sending their keys back to the mortgage-issuers as “jingle mail” – rather than continue to cover their exorbitant debt. As a chain-reaction, this will increase the devaluation of US property.

At the same time, the next phase of the current economic crisis will extend to other forms of personal debt, such as credit cards. While the US and European Central Banks continue to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into the financial institutions that created this disaster through predatory lending practices, they have done little for the millions of poorer people facing insolvency.

As another Leftist economist noted on the same panel, one can only feel “a sense of awe” at the lack of real protest about what is taking place.

In 2006, I published my second book, 2012 : The Return of Quetzalcoatl, which studied the prophesies of indigenous people indicating we are in a time of massive transformation – the transition from the “Fourth World” to the “Fifth World” according to the Hopi. Based on my book, I often find myself looking over my shoulder, wondering if current events fit the prophetic timetable of the Mayan Calendar. Although the validity of Carl Johan Calleman’s scholarship has been called into question by John Major Jenkins and others, it is interesting that Calleman predicted the current year (November 2007 – November 2008) to be the year of Tezcatlipoca – sinister deity of black magic and the jaguar – marked by economic collapse, war, and other threats.

On the one hand, I found many reasons for taking “2012” seriously as a threshold of some type of tremendous transition in human culture and consciousness, based on my research, my own synchronicities as well as esoteric and intuitive experiences. On the other hand, studies of the current state of global society insist that massive and accelerating change is unavoidable in all areas of life. The future of humanity is imperiled if we do not transform our social practices and fundamental paradigm within the next years.

Such a hypothesis is reinforced by many recent developments, from the sudden disappearance of honeybees and Chinook salmon to the comment made by a famous financier to a friend, later recounted to me, that currency will have no value in a few years, and the only thing that will be worth anything will be land. One of the depressing aspects of the Left Forum, along with the average age of the audience being well above fifty, was the palpable ambience of failure and defeatism in the crowd. Certainly, the last thirty-five years have been a miserable period for radicals in the US, who have watched the oligarchy consolidate power, instituting elements of a police state, and holding tight control of the mass media.

Crucial ideas and possibilities can vanish completely for a time – even for an entire generation – before they return with a new force and impetus, to start a new turn on the spiral. This has been the case with shamanic exploration of non-ordinary consciousness, which has made a resurgence in recent years in a wiser and more mature form than in the 1960s. Similarly, it is possible that the moment has arrived when a populist radical movement could reconstitute itself, and this could happen at a rapid pace. Radical movements often burst forth when theorists, sociologists, and academics least expect it. They arise when masses of fed-up people begin to seek direct redress against a system that has exploited and enslaved them.

That our financial system is fixed to reward a miniscule subset of the global population, the “ruling elite” who control the financial sector, is a realization that could begin to permeate the mass consciousness. Social awareness can only increase as the destructive delusions of the dominant ideology become more obvious. With the intermeshed networks of contemporary life, a new realization could spread rapidly, along with techniques to confront a system that has failed to protect the poor and the planet. The incredible mismanagement of the earth’s precious resources – the squandering of oceans, forests, animals, and air – is an indictment against the current order and its leaders. The continuity of this system is a direct threat to future generations. Although it seems unstoppable and unassailable, this system is also quite frail, utterly dependent on petroleum, on the effectiveness of constant media indoctrination, and on increasingly complicated technologies.

While most mainstream commentators and even some of the critics at the Left Forum argue that the current implosion of the financial markets is one of the periodic crises of capitalism that eventually gets resolved through institutional measures and bailouts, it actually may be far more than that. This may be neither a crisis of “liquidity” nor even one of insolvency, but a crisis of money itself- in other words, a crisis of faith in the entire belief system of capitalism, which has functioned as a displacement of religion, with money substituting for the banished god. As Karl Marx noted in his 1844 Manuscripts, money is “the visible divinity” in a capitalist world:

“By possessing the property of buying everything, by possessing the property of appropriating all objects, money is thus the object of eminent possession. The universality of its property is the omnipotence of its being. It therefore functions as almighty being. Money is the pimp between man’s need and the object, between his life and his means of life. But that which mediates my life for me, also mediates the existence of other people for me. For me it is the other person.”

When I reread some of Marx last year, for the first time since school, I was startled to encounter the tremendous depth of spiritual insight in his work. The radical essence of his thought has been obscured by the course of history, and by the desire to deny, suppress, and evade it, ever since.

Marx saw that the revolutions of the 18th Century enshrined the rights of the bourgeois individual to compete against others, rather than realizing man as a “species-being” who can only attain freedom through his communion with other men: “None of these so-called rights of man goes beyond the egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society, as man separated from life in the community and withdrawn into himself, into his private interest and his private arbitrary will. They see, rather, the life of the species itself, society, as a frame external to individuals, as a limitation of their original independence,” he wrote in “The Jewish Question.” Freedom was defined negatively, creating a social reality in which each individual had to struggle against others to preserve and increase their private domain.

As David Korten, Bernard Letaier, and others have written recently, our basic financial system in itself creates artificial scarcity, and induces competition and sociopathic behavior patterns that lead inexorably to disregard of the environment and mistreatment of others. When a bank gives out a loan to someone, they are not creating the extra money that the individual has to make as interest accrues. When they examine that person’s credit, they are checking to see if that person has the capacity to compete effectively in the marketplace and come up with the accrued interest, which is imaginary capital at the outset. The individual then struggles against others to retrieve the money he owes. Similarly, publicly traded corporations must maximize profits to satisfy shareholders, and this forces an institutional disregard for environirierital safeguards and humane practices.

Over the last decade, the deregulation of the financial system “acted like psychotropic drugs on the minds of investors,” as one Left Forum panelist noted, unleashing increasingly rapacious and mindless greed. Pushed to its limit, the logic of the system reveals itself in transparent form. The subprime mortgage market offered loans to people with little or nothing in the way of assets or collateral that began at a low rate of interest and then ballooned to massive rates later. These predatory loans were then bundled together and sold as securities, given class “AAA” status by regulatory bodies that had little interest in compelling restraint. These securities based on corrupted loans were meshed with other types of assets and securities and sold up the financial pyramid. As in the classic pyramid scheme, when the debtors at the bottom start to default, the rotten edifice comes tumbling down.

At the same time, the crumbling of this scam is revealing deep levels of tulip-style mania in the banks and financial institutions, which had developed highly convoluted mechanisms for extracting profits by lending vast, and nonexistent, sums to each other for short-term periods. While commentators think that the amount of actual wealth that is going to disappear from the world economy is $1.5 – $2 trillion, the amount of imaginary capital traded in rapid fashion to amp up artificial profits was exponentially higher than this number. At a time when credit has evaporated, whoever gets caught holding the i.o.u.’s for these massive amounts faces instant insolvency.

It appears that unleashed greed incited by deregulation of the markets has led to a massive implosion of the financial apparatus that may not be fixable within the current system. This crisis may have its roots in the early 1970s, when the US took the dollar off the gold standard, and the untethered US dollar became the global reserve currency, forcing the developing world to adopt it for international transactions and debt repayment. The building of the World Trade Centers could be seen as symbolizing the shift of the focus of the US economy from productive industry to finance capitalism, as the parasitical system of speculation on derivatives and currencies became the central wealth-producing engine within the US. The lack of US productivity coupled with a virtualized currency with no real-world referent has led to the amassing of extraordinary debt, on an individual and societal level.

The crisis may actually have far deeper roots, going back to the basis of capitalism itself, an economic system that constantly requires new markets to penetrate and cannot sustain itself without continually extending its reach. In a fully globalized world, where there are no new markets to reach or new resources to exploit, capitalism may have reached its natural limit. It is also imprecise to call the current system “capitalist” in a classical sense, as it is actually one where massive subsidies protect vested interests, from agricultural lobbies to oil companies, and the ideal of a “free market” is a convenient fiction.

In a fully globalized world, the Neoliberal model can only perpetuate itself through the types of shock effects described by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine, where destruction is encouraged and then seized upon as an opportunity to redevelop and recolonize areas already within empire. One of the panelists at the Left Forum described the mortgage meltdown as a “financial Katrina” that will allow wealthy speculators to take over urban neighborhoods where poor people have suffered mass defaults. The disastrous consequences of rampant privatization are increasingly obvious, as services become weaker, corruption increases, and prices rise.

End of the current economic paradigm

Considering the extent of delusional capital now underlying the financial system, it is possible that the current crisis could be pointing toward the end of the current economic paradigm. This could mean a real trans-valuation of our world. As Marx points out, the function of money was to transform all qualities to quantities that are ultimately equivalent. Money “is the true agent of separation as well as the true binding agent – the [universal] galvano-chemical power of society,” Marx writes in The 1844 Manuscripts. Money-as-mediator and ultimate arbiter seeks to reduce all qualities to quantities, but fails because it reduces everything to sameness, with the Midas touch of nihilism. Love and trust are basic values that elude the mediation of money.

In his great book The Gift, Lewis Hyde contrasts our modern market economy with the gift-based economies of tribal and indigenous cultures. He writes, “The desire to consume is a kind of lust. We long to have the world flow through us like air or food. We are thirsty and hungry for something that can only be carried inside bodies. But consumer goods merely bait this lust, they do not satisfy it. The consumer of commodities is invited to a meal without passion, a consumption that leads to neither satiation nor fire.” The gift, on the other hand, renews the communal bond, and requires reciprocity as well as trust. Hyde writes:

The gift moves toward the empty place. As it turns in its circle it turns toward him who has been empty-handed the longest, and if someone appears elsewhere whose need is greater it leaves its old channel and moves toward him. Our generosity may leave us empty, but our emptiness then pulls gently at the whole until the thing in motion returns to replenish us.”

If modern society reduces all value to a universal exchange of quantities, indigenous cultures were conscious of qualities that did not allow for perfect equivalences of exchange. Ultimately, it was the state of mind and heart of the giver that mattered, not the objectified value of an object.

The current economic crisis may be resolved – at least temporarily – by an international agreement between oligarchic forces that will lead to some bail outs and a renegotiation, and severe reduction, of American power in the world. Or it may be that the glue that has held together the international monetary order is coming undone, in which case a deeper process of transformation may take place.

If this is the case, then the social agreement that is money itself may be up for discussion, and the nature of value may change yet again. In other words, the current economic crisis may represent, not just a reordering of power and finance in the world, but a deeper expression of a crisis of value, and the opportunity to begin the pendulum swing back again, from an economy based on the meaningless exchange of nihilistic quantities to a different model of economy that would require alternative institutions and techniques to support the socially cohesive expression of values-based qualities.



First published: Fifth Estate, 2008
source: http://www.danielpinchbeck.net/writing/essays/

Sunday, December 7, 2014

6 December 2014, Solidarity with Nikos Romanos in Turkey






















Today, we were on streets for Alexis who was murdered by Greek State and for Nikos Romanos who  has been on  hunger strike for 26 days against the repression of the same state.

Today, we were on streets for our sisters and brothers who have been murdered while resisting in Greece, in Ferguson, in Mexico, in Kobanê.

Today, we were on streets for Berkin, Ali İsmail, Ethem, Arin, Kader, Suphi Nejat.

As  states kill our sisters and brothers all over the world; we, revolutionary anarchists were onthe streets with our anger against states, capitalists, companies and murderers. Despite of the fact that the police held up our way and attacked us with  plastic bullets, tear gas bombs and batons; they couldn't achieve to supress our anger. We resisted with our black flags while rising out our slogans.

This passion for freedom is getting bigger today; the anger for those  who have been murdered by state flare up our riot.

Revolutionary Anarchist Action 

salutes comrade Nikos Romanos' and his resistance.
Video of this action:
https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=1565161617033056&set=vb.1480916092124276&type=2&theater

Statement that read after police attack:


Today, with all the range against powers that seizes lives, with the conviction to a free world, the black flags are waved all around the world. Against companies that exploit our labour to profit more; against states that murders many of us in the name of the borders they drew; against all powers that fill their pockets with our lives that they destroy, making us poorer and making the rich richer; rebellion is alive in the rage of anachism. The rage against bosses, companies, murderers and states, is propagating in full flood with the black flags. The sorrow of being neglected, dissapeared and murdered, is now turing into anger, and the street are burning with the rage all over.

Exactly 6 yers ago, in Exerchia neignourhood of Athens, murdered because he was an anarchist, at the age of 16, was Alexandros Grigoropulos. Murdered by a cop, with the bullet from his gun, because he transformed his anger into rebellion and went on the street, calling to account for the lives being seized, becuase he didn't obey the powers and he was resisting at all costs for freedom. On the day of December 6, 2008, The bullet that ran into Alexis's chest turned in the fire of revolt in the streets. Even though the murderers continued their attacks, the rage against the ones that silenced a heart that was beating for freedom, burned the streets into flames in Athens, in Thessaloniki, in Istanbul and everywhere.

Nikos Romanos, who was with Alexis the day he was murdered and who also had the same conviction for a free world, is now captivated because he is an anarchist. Romanos is captivated because he was not silent against injustice, because he didn't give up despite state oppresion, because with the same conviction of his murdered comrade, he kept on the struggle against all powers. The ones who think they can terminate this struggle by murdering Alexis, are now captivating Nikos hoping to stop another heart that is beating with the conviction for anarchism. Just like in 2008, the steets are filled with anger against the state that continue to attack Romanos with all its isolation, oppresion and torture. As Romanos continues his hunger strike since 10th of Novembre, other anarchist comrades in captive also start hunger strikes in solidarity; universities are occupied; and the same voice echoes in burning streets, in cells resisiting captive: "As long as we are alive and we breate, long live anarchy!"

The powers that murdered Alexis in 2008 and that captivate Nikos today think that they can silence the rage against injustice that is growing in every part of the world. They continue to captivate, attack and murder under this illusion.

In Mexico, 43 students resisting politics of the powers seizing their future, had disappeared by the hand of state; and their bodies are found in mass graves after many days. Just because they are black, the people targeted by fasist repression of the power, become the targets of bullets shot by the police; and the ones who resist being taken to custody are strangling and murdered by the police. Many of our brothers like Berkin, Ethem Ali, Ahmet who resisted for their lives, were murdered by the state police.  While the ones resisting in Kobanê to create a new life, like Arin, like Suphi Nejat, like Kader, are murdered by the gangs, military and soldiers of the state; the ones who are on the streets in every corner of the region embracing Kobanê resistance, like Hakan, like Mahsun, are the targeted by the murderer police of the same state...

Wherever the ones who call to account for injustice, who resist to win their lives, who struggle with their conviction of freedom are on the streets; there is the adress for oppression, torture and massacre. The oppressors who think that they can discourage the ones who don't obey them by captivating, kidnapping or murdering; a cry of freedom raised in one place is echoed from every direction. From the cells of Athens to Mexico, from the streets of Ferguson to Istanbul, to the free lands of Kobanê, the convision for a new world is propagating in full flood. Now, this passion for freedom is getting bigger; the rage for the murders is flaring up the fire of revolt in hearts.

This revolt is against the powers that seize our lives, that intend to destroy our freedom, that murder us. This revolt is against capitalism and the states. This revolt is against all kinds of captivity.

With this revolt for freedom in our hearts, anarchism is growing in every part of the world.

And our struggle is growing from one corner of the world to another, carried by the waves of the black flags.



Long live Revolution, long live anarchy!



Revolutionary Anarchist Action (DAF)

Lycee Aanrchist Action (LAF)

Anarchist Youth (AG)

Anarchist Women

MAKI

TAÇANKA

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Black Lives Matters! Ferguson is burning after grand jury decision of no-charges for police officer who killed Michael Brown LIVE REPORT












Ferguson, Missouri, erupts in violence after grand jury verdict not to charge Darren Wilson for shooting dead unarmed black teenager Michael Brown - follow live updates







VOID NETWORK expresses solidarity for the uncompromised struggle of people all over Amerikkka against the police brutality and the totalitarian "justice" regime that offers to any policeman the right to kill people in the streets with "no-charges" for centuries now! This has to end NOW, the state can not shoot us anymore and no one cares...WE CARE!
DEATH TO THE TYRANNES! FIGHT FOR FREEDOM



13.30 It's now 7.30am in Ferguson.

• Darren Wilson, the policeman who was cleared last night of charges relating to the shooting of Michael Brown, has still not been seen.

• Police confirm that 61 people were arrested, 150 gunshots were fired, and a dozen buildings burnt.

• Following the verdict, at around 8pm in Missouri, protests were staged in New York, Chicago, California and Seattle.

13.02 An update on the arrests overnight.

St Louis County Police spokesman Brian Schellman said there were 61 arrests in Ferguson overnight, many for burglary and trespassing.

Francis Slay, the mayor of St Louis, said there were 21 arrests in his city, where some protesters broke business windows.

(...)

11.28 Jon Belmar, St Louis County police chief, has just been speaking about the damage overnight.

He said that at least a dozen buildings were torched and that he counted about 150 gunshots during a night of looting, vandalism, arson and clashes between demonstrators and police that resulted in at least 29 arrests.

Flights over the area were restricted and police struggled to contain protesters who took to the streets of Ferguson, a suburb of St Louis, smashing shop windows and torching cars and businesses despite President Barack Obama's calls for restraint.

Although no serious injuries were reported, Mr Belmar said the rioting on Monday night and early Tuesday morning was "much worse" than disturbances which erupted in the immediate aftermath of the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson on Aug 9.




REPORT by , Ferguson for Telegraph.uk


 For a few brief moments, the crowd outside the Ferguson police headquarters fell silent.
The cries of “hands up, don’t shoot” were hushed as hundreds of demonstrators - many concealing their faces behind balaclavas and Guy Fawkes masks - strained to hear the news coming over the car radio.
They listened as the St Louis County prosecutor announced what to many was a foregone conclusion: the white police officer who killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, would not face criminal charges.

And then the crowd was silent no more.

The streets of Ferguson erupted in fury once again after a grand jury decided not to charge Officer Darren Wilson with any crime for the August shooting. 
 Demonstrators vented months of pent-up anger on the streets outside the police department where Mr Wilson once worked, looting and burning shops, setting fire to police cars and hurling bricks at the lines of riot police who challenged them.

In a grim replay of the violence that wracked this Missouri city over the summer, heavily-armed police responded to the sound of gunshots with tear gas and rolled through the streets in armoured vehicles.

Police reported hearing “heavy automatic gunfire” in Ferguson while fires broke out in neighbouring Dellwood and looting was reported in St Louis. A police officer in University City, a few miles south, was shot but it was unclear if the incident was related to the protests in Ferguson.

The clashes began shortly after 8pm, when Robert McCulloch, the St Louis County prosecuting attorney, announced that the 12 jurors - nine white and three black - had decided not to bring charges.

"They determined that no probable cause exists to file any charge against Officer Wilson," he said.
 Mr Brown’s parents immediately released a statement saying they were “profoundly disappointed that the killer of our child will not face the consequences of his actions”.

But Michael Brown Senior and Lesley McSpadden, who have taken their campaign for justice for their son as far as the United Nations in Geneva, also appealed for calm, asking the protesters to “channel your frustration in ways that will make a positive change”.

Their plea was echoed by President Barack Obama, who made a late-night appearance at the White House to remind demonstrators that the US was “a nation built on the rule of law”.

But by the time Mr Obama appeared, the television networks were already splitting their screens between the White House briefing room and the violence on South Florissant Road in Ferguson.

Rioters began by smashing the windows of sandwich shops
directly next door to the police headquarters, ignoring the festive letters spelling out “Seasons Greetings” between two telephone poles.
But they moved quickly from breaking windows to setting fire to unprotected police cars. One young black man, who would not give his name, looked on approvingly as a squad car burned, the ammunition stored inside it crackling in the heat.
“These cops can go around and kill our people and absolutely nothing happens to them,” the young man said. “We can’t get justice in the courts so we need to take it for ourselves.”
Police had initially maintained a light presence, with only a handful of officers visible and none in riot gear.
But as the crowd’s anger mounted, a phalanx of police surged into view, carrying shields and batons and forming a line beneath the American flag outside their headquarters. 






 Soon a column of armoured vehicles began to roll north from the direction of the motorway. An oddly-nasal voice rang out over vehicle speakers and into the freezing night: “You must stop throwing projectiles at police. You are unlawfully assembled. You must disperse.”

When words proved insufficient the teargas followed. Canisters rattled at the feet of the demonstrators and painful smoke billowed out, filling throats and leaving eyes watering in pain.

The violence came in fits and starts and at times the demonstrators were happy to stand before the row of police shields and hurl abuse at the officers behind them.

The largely-black crowd saved their angriest taunts for the African-American police officers. “Traitors!” shouted one man as a black officer watch impassively from behind a visor. “If that was your son, you wouldn’t be standing there.”





Many of the young African-American men were equally disdainful of Mr Obama and his appeals for calm from hundreds of miles away.
“The President is not even one of us, I would say that to his face,” said a man who identified himself as “Faze”. He pointed to the fact Mr Obama’s father was a Kenyan immigrant, rather than the descendant of slaves. “He doesn't get it, he doesn’t know what’s happening here.”
Darren Wilson, the police officer whose bullets ripped through the facade of what some call “post-racial” America, has been in hiding since August and did not appear after being cleared by the grand jury.
His lawyers released a statement saying that “law enforcement personnel must frequently make split-second and difficult decisions. Officer Wilson followed his training and followed the law.”

 Five hours after the grand jury announcement, a dozen buildings were reported to have been consumed by flame, along with a number of cars that were set alight.

But not all the demonstrators who appeared to protest the jury’s decision turned to violence. One large group remained outside the police station, banging drums and chanting: “This is what community looks like.”

At the corner of South Florissant Road and Suburban Avenue, Shala Jones stood holding her three year-old daughter, Lonnie.

“I’m here tonight because this is her future,” said Ms Jones, as she tucked a blanket closer around her child. “Young black children need to know they can be safe in America.” 





SOURCE: The Telegraph.uk

Sunday, November 2, 2014

African Anarchism, an introduction


















Welcome to African Anarchism! Void Network introduces a site that is intended to be a resource for anarchists and other anti-authoritarian revolutionary socialists in Africa, and for all those interested in the liberation of this most exploited continent. 

the site is:

Africa has endured centuries of suffering and deprivation in a world of plenty. Capitalism has indisputably failed to provide even a minimum standard of living to Africans. The authoritarian capitalists who called themselves "state socialists" have also proved to offer no answers to the problems of the continent.
In this context anarchism is not merely one solution, it is the only possible solution that can allow the African masses to fulfill their longings for a life free from misery and exploitation. In the last few years anarchist groups and individuals have started to emerge across the continent, although these are still small shoots, they are a beginning and once they spread anarchism should prove to be a very powerful force in Africa. The African masses have little to lose, once they throw off their mental chains, global capitalism will shudder under their mighty revolutionary force.
Unfortunately, it is very difficult for African workers to communicate to the outside world, since access to technology in Africa is extremely limited, so very often, the information contained in these pages provides more questions than answers. We are always looking for more information about anarchism in Africa, so if you can add anything to what we have here; news about movements, libertarian analysis or other interesting matter, please contact the site: http://www.struggle.ws/africa/

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Touching the heart: about the blackmail concerning 'the immigrants'




















During the last 10 years, a lot of comrades in different countries have participated in the struggle around the question of migration, whether it be about the struggle of paperless people to get regularized, the struggle around housing in poor neighbourhoods, the struggle against raids on the street and on the public transport or the struggle against the detention centres. Often these have led to a repetition of certain impasses or to powerlessness regarding possible interventions.

A recipe does not exist, but we do consider it necessary to break with some militant mechanisms which have too often made us struggle on an activist base lacking perspectives or agitate under the directions of authoritarian groups, with or without papers. These thoughts simply want to draw up the balance of struggle experiences and to work out some possible tracks for the development of a subversive projectuality around migration and its management, a projectuality which we can call ours.

Beyond the illusion of the ‘immigrant’

Having a closer look on the protagonists of a social conflict and subordinate them to more or less militant sociological analyses is a classical approach towards an attempt to understand the context of a social conflict and to intervene in it. Not only does this approach focus upon finding the answer to the mysterious question “who are they?” instead of examining ourselves about what we want, it is as well based upon some doctrines which disturb our critical reflection. Next to the usual leftist racketeers who are desperately looking for no matter what political subject which can bring them to the head of a resistance, a lot of sincere others are to be found alongside the paperless people. But since they consider the specific situation of the paperless as something exterior, they are mostly rather driven by an outrage instead of by a desire to struggle together with those who share a common (although not exactly the same) condition: exploitation, police control on the streets or on the public transport, housing in the outskirts or in the neighbourhoods which are being upgraded, illegal activities which are part of the survival techniques. Both of them often reproduce all of the divisions which are useful to the domination. Creating a new general image of the immigrant-victim-in-struggle equals the introduction of a sociological mystification which does not only hinder every common struggle but as well strengthens the states grip on all of us.

Libertarian or radical activists (who nonetheless have a certain intuition about what could be a possible common track) are fairly often not the last ones swallowing this pill in their need of collectivity or in the name of the autonomousness of the struggle, as if the struggle is put up by some sort of homogeneous block instead of by individuals, potential accomplices at least against a certain oppression. In relation to the paperless people all of the sudden the methods of struggle (self organisation, refusal of institutional mediation, direct action) became way more relative. The good Samaritan will always appear to explain, using some classical arguments out of the militant tirade, that breaking the windows of an air company which deports during a manifestation will bring the paperless ‘into danger’ (them who nonetheless face up to the police day by day); that the struggle against fascists (e.g. the members of the Turkish Grey Wolves), nationalists (e.g. certain refugees who came here after the disintegration of former Yugoslavia) or priests (e.g. the priest who ‘refuges’ the paperless in ‘his’ church to afterwards kick them out, the Christian associations which take up the vile task of the state like Cimade, Caritas International or the Red Cross) ends at the doorstep of the paperless collectives; that you can spit into the face of a French or Belgian ambassador but not into the face of a Malian one which comes mediating a struggle that threatens to radicalise (idem the leftist politicians who are generally considered unacceptable but being tolerated in the name of a false unity which is demanded by some chief of a paperless collective).

It is known to everybody that a struggle always departs from the existent and that the initial differences often differ a lot (e.g. the relation towards the trade unions in the major part of the struggles concerned with exploitation), but according to us it’s all about going beyond those in a subversive dynamic. We will certainly not succeed in this by accepting the variety of authoritarian straitjackets – the goal is already in the means you acquire. Moreover because this relativism doesn’t lead towards a confrontation in the struggle but to some sort of reverse colonialism which makes the immigrants once more into an object with a supposedly different-being (“they” would be like that). In that case the misery is not intended to scare off but to excuse all renouncement.

The “innocent immigrant”, the passive eternal victim which is being exploited, arrested, locked up and deported is one of the most prominent characters of this ideological narrowing down. As a reaction to the daily racist propaganda which aims at giving the immigrant the role of the social enemy who is the source of all evil (from unemployment to unsafety and terrorism), a lot of people de facto deny the immigrant all criminal capacity. They aim at presenting the immigrants as being servile, begging for their integration with hopes on a less detestable place in the society of the capital. In this way thousands of refugees are being transformed into sympathetic and therefore integratable victims: victims of war, of ‘natural’ catastrophes and misery, of human traffickers and rack-renters. But what is forgotten are the changes these tracks make to individuals: they create solidarity, resistance and struggle which allow some of them to break the passivity which was attributed to them.

Surprise and embarrassed silence rule the leftist camp and her democratic antiracism when these ‘innocents’ defend themselves by all means against the faith imposed on them (e.g. revolts in detention centres, confrontations during raids, wild strikes…). The revolts expressed in a collective way might still be understood by some as “those deeds of desperation”, but a prisoner putting his cell on fire all alone is called a “maniac” whose deed most certainly does not constitute as part of the “struggle”. Hunger strikers in a church are wanted, not the arsonists or escaped prisoners from the detention centres; the people who have been thrown out of the window of a police station or drowned are being understood, but not those who resist against the police during a raid; parents of children attending school get helped with pleasure, in contrast to the bachelor thieves. The revolt and the individuals who revolt do not fit into the sociological framework of the immigrant-victim that has been made up by the good conscience of the militant with the aid of the academic parasites of the state.

This mystification hinders a more precise understanding of migration and the migration streams. Clearly, migrations in the first place are a consequence of the daily economical terror of the capital and the political terror of local regimes and their bourgeoisie, all of which give profit to the rich countries. Nevertheless it would be incorrect to state that only the poor proletarians migrate to the rich countries as is sworn to by the thirdworldists in their construction of the immigrant-victim subject. The migrants who succeed in entering the gates of Europe clandestinely are not necessarily the poorest (since those are forced to internal migrations to the cities or to neighbouring countries according to the fluctuations of the market and her disasters) – be it even only because of the cost (financial and human) of such a travel or the social and cultural selection inside of the family of those who can afford taking such a step.

If we try to understand everything that forms and traverses every individual rather than setting down the difference and otherness in order to justify an exterior position of ‘support’, we can view a whole complexity including the class differences. At that point we can determine that the collectives of paperless do as well exist out of over certified graduates, failed politicians, local exploiters who managed their travelling money on the expense of others… who migrate to this side of the world because they want to take their enjoyable place inside of the capitalist democracy. Thus many groups of paperless are being dominated by those who were already powerful (be it on a social, political or symbolical level) or were striving for it. These class differences are seldomly taken into account by comrades engaged in a struggle together with paperless people, a struggle in which language becomes an unavoidable and invisible barrier assigning the immigrants coming from the richer classes of their country automatically to the role of spokesman and translator. Sharpening these class differences as we do everywhere is not simply a contribution which can be made by comrades but a necessary condition for real solidarity.

In order to understand these struggle dynamics, throwing some comfortable illusions into the garbage bin is necessary as well. Only a stubborn determinism can claim that a certain social condition necessarily implicates the revolt against it. This kind of reasoning used to offer the guarantee of a revolution, a guarantee that many have cherished for a long time while simultaneously degrading the perspective of the individual rebellion which generalizes into insurrection to the level of an adventure. The criticism made on a determinism that has shown its failure in the old workers movement is suitable as well for the proletarians which migrate to this side of the world. Many amongst them look at the West as some kind of oasis where you can live nicely as long as you’re prepared to make big efforts. Undergoing conditions of exploitation that resemble what they’ve been running away from, with bosses who as well play on the paternalistic snare of belonging to a so called common community; being chased; not having any or only a few perspectives on climbing higher on the social ladder and a daily racism which tries to canalize the dissatisfaction of the other exploited, all of this makes up a rude reality to confront. Contrasting the resignation which can sprout from this painful confrontation or the reflex of locking oneself up into the authoritarian communities which are based on for example religion or nationalism, we put forward the perspective not to link up with all paperless in a ‘categorical’ way but with those who refuse their role as exploited and by this way open as well the identification of the enemy. We don’t want the blaming between the capitalist universality and the particularities but a social war in which we can recognize each other beyond the question of papers and different degrees of exploitation, in a permanent struggle for a society free of masters and slaves. As in any struggle in fact, would it not be that the struggle around migration mostly ends by the weight of the affective feeling of guilt, the urgency to prevent a deportation and its possible consequences, and all of this mostly via a relation based on exteriority instead of on a shared revolt.

The impasse of the struggle for regularisation

In several European countries, a lot of ‘massive’ regularisations took place at the last turn of the century. Although the State follows her own logic, the struggling paperless were able to influence the criteria and rhythm of the regularisations. A comparison can be made to all “big social reforms”, some of which have been achieved through bloodshed while others were buy-outs to maintain the social peace or simply granted in function of capitals need to keep the working class grouped and to increase interior consumption. In those days debates about demands that suit the capitals movement in contrast to insurrectional try-outs were going on in the working class as well. A lot of revolutionaries only accepted these demands as a possibility towards permanent agitation while at the same time it was clearly put that the social question could not be solved inside of a capitalist framework.

In the time preceding to these regularisation waves the States were divided between two adversary logics: the growing stream of clandestine migration did on the one hand fit the economic need for flexible workers (as in the construction, catering industry, cleaning sector, agriculture) of countries with an ageing population, on the other hand did this partly denied (as in countries knowing a more recent migration as Spain and Italy) but especially in nature less controllable population disturb the drastic will to manage the public order. While this issue was quickly resolved – more specifically by a closer cooperation between the different authorities (through the exchange of services between the imams and police offices as well as through the distribution of tasks amongst the different foreign and autochthonous mobs, despite some previous bloody games which had to do with unavoidable concurrence) -, the issue of the need for workers was resolved by a tighter interdependence between migration streams and the labour market. It seems to be one of the ruling tendencies on a European level to aim at a more worked out migration management which is tuned up in real time to the needs of the exploitation. Next to the classic labour form of the migrants (work in black) stands the migration which links the permit to stay to a working contract which will become the rule overtime, fitting the reorganisation of the labour delicacy which extends to everybody.

The state has almost put an end to the political asylum, has tightened up the family reunion and the obtainment of citizenship by marriage, has abolished the permit to stay for a longer period (like the one of 10 years in France), while she’s on the other hand rejecting regularisation demands using an iron fist. The state directs itself towards what was called “chosen migration” by a certain president. We’re returning to the era in which the sergeant recruiters went to the villages and loaded trucks with the amount of migrants needed by their bosses. The modern formula simply asks a rationalisation of this recruitment on the borders, co managed by the state and the employers (2). The workers are absolutely not supposed to stay and settle down. At the same time different camps at the external borders of Europe are under construction by the state, camps for those who have not been chosen by the grace of the slave tradesmen.

Because all the others are there. All those standing in front of a closed gate and all those continuing to arrive. That’s what’s at stake for the change in the degree of the police rationalisation of the deportation system which continues multiplying its camps and organizes more and more massive deportations, national quotes and European charter flights for those who managed their way through the locks of the waiting zones and the racketeering of the human traffickers and other mobs. However nobody cherishes any real illusions: the number of migrants without papers will increase as long as the economic causes continue to exist no matter what deployment (as can be seen at the border between Mexico and the States where a wall of 1200 kilometres is under construction), which will have no consequences apart from the increase of the passage costs and the amount of dead. Only the multiplication of her deportations would enable the state to apply her laws concerning forced expulsion from the territory. But that is not the question, because these deployments do not primarily aim at deporting all paperless, but serve to terrorize the whole of the immigrated workers (the regularized as well as those chosen to have a permit to stay) so that their condition of exploitation which resembles the one they escaped can remain unaltered (internal delocalisation in a certain way) while pressure is put down on the whole of the exploitation conditions. The racist excuse moreover serves to deploy the arsenal of social control which touches everybody.

But let us neither forget about the changing character of migration itself. Industrial capitalism used workers as pawns on a game board following an easy logic: here we have too many workers and there we need them. And whenever the need was rather small, other aspects of this population politics were put into action. However, this specific form of migration control has changed as a result of the restructuring of the economic aspect and because of the consequences of industrial growth. You can notice that speaking of a point of departure as well as a point of arrival becomes more difficult. The points of department have been devastated by hunger, war and disasters while the destinations are changing all the time. In this way migration becomes an endless track consisting of different stages; it’s no longer a movement from point A to B. These new forms of migration are not only being defined by the needs of a constantly flexible and adjustable capital. Millions of people, uprooted by the devastation of the places where they were been born are swarming all over this world – ready to be put at work. And the deployments of this control are very visible: the humanitarian refugee camps, the camps at the borders, the slums and the favelas. The struggles for regularisation seem to pose rather few questions concerning this new fact. The situation in Belgium is a good example of the current impasses of the struggle for regularisation. The state acted simultaneously as a lion and a fox when the tension around the closed centres began to rise in 1998. As a lion she repressed the most rebellious parts of the movement (murder of Semira Adamu (3) who was resisting stiffly in the centres; house searches and arrest of comrades who were active in this struggle). As a fox she started negotiating about regularisations with the other part of the movement. Clearly, the demand for regularisation (besides the fact that it equals the demand for integration) does require certain credibility, a recognized mediator. The movement got hit in this way. Regularisation, which once used to be the answer of the state to the tension and agitation which challenged the whole of the migration politics (using slogans against all camps or for a free circulation), became the goal for most of the paperless groups. Instead of forcing the state to give a bonus by struggling, the collectives started a dialogue which was followed by negotiations which attracted a whole army of professional negotiators and juridical charlatans who would solve all problems. The dynamics were on the one hand broken by repression and on the other hand by the start of a bureaucratic dialogue. Neither the successive self-mutilations (as the hunger strikes outside of the camps), nor the most servile self-abasements were enough to win what in a certain way used to be an answer of the state on agitation. The first answer of the state was combined with a rationalisation of the closed centres and a stricter adjustment of the permits to stay in connection to the needs of the economy (the state herself gave different colours to the cards).

During the last years the current situation with its cycle of occupations/hunger strikes/deportations suffocated us during the last years in a struggle experience which offered only a few possibilities to go beyond and share a perspective: experiences of self organisation which do not accept neither politician nor religious or trade union leaders; direct actions which permit the development of a real power balance and the identification of the class enemy in all of her aspects. These observations lead us to feel the need and desire for developing a subversive projectuality departing from our bases, instead of running behind an enlargement (which seems to be more and more further away) based on the demand for regularisation. This projectuality could find her first anchors in the revolt which is factually shared amongst those who struggle for the destruction of the centres and those who (e.g. the rebels of Vincennes or Steenokkerzeel) put the critic of detention into deeds by putting their prison on fire.

Against the deportation machine

While facing these difficulties a debate that is still going on nowadays rises: the debate about solidarity. A lot of comrades continue defending the necessity –at whatever cost- of our presence inside of the paperless groups, until they retreat from any similar struggle, disgusted after so many blows. The justifications are diverse and most of the time a reflection of an activism or of comfortable recipes lacking imagination, lacking any real desire for subversion. And here as well: although the collective character of an action is no criterion for us, we do understand the need “to break the isolation” felt by some comrades. Nevertheless do we doubt if we can manage this by participating in endless meetings, being locked up with 30 people in a squat or an apartment block of paperless and leftists. We tend more towards the development of our own project and so to start from our own bases. As long as solidarity is understood as support to certain social categories, it will continue being an illusion. Even if it would entail some more radical methods, it will continuously be dragged along in a conflict with bases, methods and perspectives which are not ours at all. The only justification left is claiming that by taking part in these conflicts we can ‘radicalize’ the people because their social condition would necessarily lead them towards sharing our ideas. As long as this concept of ‘radicalisation’ is understood as a task of missionaries wanting others to swallow their ideas it will continue to be stuck in the impasse which we notice growing everywhere around. This ‘radicalisation’ however can as well be understood as openness of our dynamic towards others, enabling us to guarantee the autonomy of our own projectuality. In this way, ‘being together’ in a struggle and going forward on the level of perspectives as well as methods demands an existing basic affinity, a first rupture, a first desire that goes beyond the usual demands. In this way our demand for mutuality can become meaningful. There are a lot more tracks to explore than the continuation of the connection which only reason for existing is the maintenance of the fiction of the political subject that in the name of its statute as being the main victim, monopolizes the reason for the struggle and by this way the struggle itself. To put things clear we could say that solidarity is in need of a mutual recognition in deeds as well as in words. It is difficult to be solidary with a paperless “in struggle” who demands his regularisation and the one of his family without any interest whatsoever in the perspective of the destruction of the closed centres. Maybe we would still meet somewhere but this will be on a purely practical base: we don’t need to analyse the reasons nor perspectives which bring somebody to revolt in order to recognize ourselves, at least partly, in these deeds of attack which automatically turn against the responsibles of this misery. As counts for most of the intermediary struggles: there is only a very limited sense in participating to a factory conflict which departs from demands for wage and does not overcome the trade unionist framework, nor develops any sign of direct action. It is limited because there simply is no common base. New perspectives open up at the moment when these workers start sabotaging (even if they regard it as a means to pressure the bosses) or kick out their deputes (even if only because they feel betrayed).

So, instead of holding on to more and more slogans such as “solidarity with the immigrants / in struggle” (but which struggle?), we could develop a projectuality against the closed centres using methods and ideas which are ours and subversive in the sense that they question the foundations of this world (the exploitation and domination). This projectuality would be autonomous and strengthened by deeds of revolt contrasting the overall resignation, and strengthening these deeds in return. Again, recipes do not exist but today it is important to go beyond the impasses of a more or less humanist activism which hinders any radical autonomy in favour of an agitation which conceives the cadence of power or follows the logic of the only as legitimate conceived actors of the struggle, while it is actually the freedom of all which is at stake as for example in the case of the raids. As it is important to put forward perspectives which, beyond the partial goals developed in these intermediary struggles, are able to widen up the matter to a horizon which finally questions the whole of this world and its horror; meaning perspectives which are able to always put forward the matters of domination and exploitation. The diffuse attacks could make up the heart of this projectuality. Not only do they offer the advantage of exceeding the powerlessness felt while standing in front of the wall or barbed wire of a camp or while being confronted to a raid with a police deployment that can adjust itself and count on the passivity and fear of the passer-bys, but as well and especially do they offer us on the one hand the possibility to develop our own temporality and on the other hand to show everyone that the structures of the deportation machine which can be found on every corner of the street are vulnerable and at last they offer real action possibilities to everyone, regardless of the number they are.

/Some enthusiastic Internationalists

http://acorpsperdu.wikidot.com/touching-the-heart

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

"To a Friend / Essay on Blanqui" by The Imaginary Party























The ingenuity of the Imaginary Party's essay on Blanqui is that it goes way beyond merely contextualizing Blanqui; it even goes beyond trying to defend the indefensible Blanqui, the revolutionary who is unacceptable to everyone, especially self-proclaimed revolutionaries. "To a friend" (as the preface is also known) aims to be a modern Blanquist statement: an advancement of Blanqui's own ideas and actions by people unafraid to be called "Blanquists." Who will stop these "agents" of the Imaginary Party from seizing these positions? No one. This terrain is completely empty of other combatants; and no one will want to re-take it once it has been seized. A very neat trick: affirm Blanqui by negating his absence. And, more importantly, a very meaningful gesture: there are other once-revolutionary terrains can be re-taken by agents of the Imaginary Party without firing a single shot.
Part of the introduction from translator's collective 
NOT BORED!
3 June 2009



"To a friend"

"To judge from the current disposition of people's minds, communism isn't exactly knocking on the door. But nothing is as deceptive as the situation, because nothing is so changeable." (Blanqui)
We are still afflicted by many superstitions. We have our collective hallucinations that are only doubted by the crazy, and our images of ourselves that are only distinguishable from those of yesteryear by being more secular. We meet our equals and we sincerely believe we see persons and people. We love someone, and we speak of "the Other." A century separates us from a certain life and we postulate it as being faraway. Dissimilar customs or a few variations in vocabulary are sufficient to convince us of an uncrossable distance. But what we understand can only be a part of ourselves; what we understand cannot go much further [than that]. Enlighten yourself: Blanqui[1] is not a historical person. He does not return to us as a phantom from the 19th century, though a century can traverse the ages. Blanqui is from yesterday, tomorrow, today. Blanqui did indeed exist, the facts attest to it, but the facts also attest to the fact he existed, above all, as a conceptual persona, like Nietzsche's Zarathustra, Bataille's Gilles de Rai or Artaud's Heliogabale.[2] From whence comes Blanqui's proper eternity. Gustave Lefrancais notes in his Souvenirs: "For the 400,000 voters of la Seine, 'Blanqui' is a revolutionary expression."[3] The name 'Blanqui' relates, not to a person, but to an existential possibility, to a manner of being-there, to a power of affirmation. If Blanqui was named "the Imprisoned One," this was in part due to his three decades in jail, but also due to the stubbornness with which this power remained in the historical figure of Blanqui. Prison, glory and calumny are the means that opportunely command the necessity of isolating [human] existences that are too ardent.
*
The universal desire to be someone, to be recognized, founds the comic atrocity of our era and gives it an aspect of free improvisation in the midst of crazy people, an open-air theatre of narcissistic pathologies of all kinds. We divert our glance from this bad show. We imagine a being who could not close his or her eyes to the horror of the present (this canvas of boredom, injustice, stupidity, separation and cynicism, the disastrous coherence of which is guaranteed by the police); a being who a kind of infirmity, certainly, but also perhaps some spirit of defiance had rendered unable to remain at peace with such a state of things; a being who had also found, while still young and in the midst of rioting, fires and conspiracy, the exact contraries of what he saw around him: intelligence, courage, adventure, friendship and truth. Such a being -- and there is no doubt that there were a number of people who, at that very moment, lived and sought each other out -- would be Blanqui, as much as Blanqui was Blanqui. Each moment of his life, each beat of his heart, would be propelled by these unique questions: How to do it? How to constitute a revolutionary force? How to win? Historical figures are there to provide screens for the powers that carry them. Nothing is simpler, clearer, more communal than Blanqui. And this is precisely why it will be necessary to cloud this menacing clarity with so many calumnies, rumors and dirty water. There is no "Mystery of Blanqui," despite all of his nocturnal intrigues, secret enterprises and [other] confabs. There is only bottomless evidence of a revolutionary existence. But what devil drove him? How could he still attempt, how could he still want to apply himself, always and forever, to theorizing [penser] the situation after so many betrayals, losses and disappointments? And what does it all mean? Don't worry, spectators: he will cave in one day and you will be able to whisper about him. Or he will triumph, and you will succumb. By waiting [for Blanqui], he will be your obsession; it will be your possibility that you will exhaust by incessantly conjuring him up.
*
"The me has always left me cold."[4] This is what Blanqui opposed to the malevolent hysteria, to the concert of jealousy that his very nature sufficed to unleash. And this redoubled the din. He who does not deign to respond to his accusers, who have in their turn circulated rumors, he must expect to see them become exaggerated, then dry up into thin streams of bile. Warning to the activist milieus:
"If you encounter these personal hatreds, jealousies and rivalries of ambition, I will join with you to weaken them; they are one of the scourges of our cause; but remark that they are not a special plague of our party; all of our adversaries suffer from them as we do. They only explode with greater noise in our ranks because of the more expansive character and more open morals of the democratic world. Furthermore, individual struggles focus on human infirmity; it is necessary to resign oneself to such weaknesses and take men as they are. To lose one's temper about a fault of nature is puerile, if not stupid. Firm spirits know how to navigate through the obstacles that can't be removed but which can be avoided or overcome by anyone. Thus, we know to yield to the necessity and, deploring the evil, never slow down our march. To repeat: the truly political man doesn't keep obstacles in mind and instead goes straight ahead, without otherwise worrying about the pebbles on the road ahead."
This is in the letter to Maillard.[5] Read it.
*
Dionys Mascolo[6] said something about Saint-Just that is also worthy of Blanqui: "Saint-Just's 'inhumanity' lay in the fact that he didn't have several distinct lives, like other men, but a single one." The custom among human beings is to let life go by. The hand on the shoulder that says, "Go, have no cares, it will pass," is the best-known carrier of this grippe. Thus, 'inhuman' is the one who devotes herself to the highest intensity she has encountered like a truth. The one who does not oppose herself to the shock, to the motion of experience, the hesitations of bad faith, skepticism and comfort. She becomes a force in her turn. A little discipline, and this force -- the force that attaches her to this intensity -- will successfully organize the maelstrom of attractions that compose all of us and imprint upon them a unique direction. What spectators stupidly call "will" is instead an unreserved abandon. For Blanqui, the intensity was insurrection. It was insurrection that, from the first days of July [1830], polarized his existence. "Liberty, equality, fraternity" is a decoration in bad taste for the porticoes of schools; for some it is also the most succinct expression of the experience of being in a riot. "Liberty, equality, fraternity" in street combat, facing death. It is still too soon to say how many Blanquis were born to the world in Genoa [Italy] on 20-21 July 2001. So many have already died from being unable to find, in the desert of the real, the road that leads there. "Weapons and organization -- these are the decisive elements of progress, the serious means by which to have done with poverty! He who has iron, has bread. We grovel before the bayonets; we sweep away the unarmed crowds. France bristles with workers in arms: it is the advent of socialism."
*
We lead ourselves astray by reviving the specter of "the superman."[7] Blanqui's enemies amply take up this question. "Somber temperament, haughty, unsociable, hypochondriac, sarcastic, great ambition, cold, inexorable, pitilessly breaking men to pave his road. Heart of marble, head of iron." "The head and heart of the proletarian party in France" (a journalist). "The most cynical of the demoniacs conjured up by the fear of modern society" (a reactionary). These are maneuvers suited to assure the isolation of a being outside the prisons. The superman is a toy, as man is a chimera. It is sufficient to distinguish between the mediocre existence that floats and navigates by what is possible, and the settled existence that is attached to a truth and works and makes headway from it. It isn't curious that the word "destiny" [destin] is derived from the [Latin] verb destinare, which means "to attach."[8] He who becomes devoted [s'attache] must become less and less a "person" and more and more a presence. Less and less "human," but more and more communal, simpler. With good cause, the subject of such an attachment is treated as "irreducible," because it is no longer reducible to itself. For our part, we are please to name the reducible the crowd of those who, taking themselves for people, betray themselves at every moment.
*
On the eve of the proclamation of the [Paris] Commune, [Adolphe] Thiers took Blanqui away. He kept Blanqui in secret and refused to exchange him for sixty-four hostages, including the Archbishop of Paris. Flotte[9] recounts this remark by Thiers: "To bring Blanqui to the insurrection is to send him a force equal to an armed corps." Blanqui is feared, and even in his own party, not as a leader, but as power. He knows how to show his abilities in [both] action and thought, and to practice [tenir] them together. One need search no further for the origin of the implacable hatred and the unfailing loyalty that Blanqui inspired. "The tribunes compare [s'addresser] the heroic and barbaric beastliness of the multitudes to a wild bearing, the lion's face, Taurus' neck. As for Blanqui, the cold mathematician of revolt and reprisals, he seems to hold between his thin fingers the tally [le devis] of the sorrows and rights of the people" (Valles, L'Insurge).[10] Blanqui addressed himself to justice and determination; he addressed himself to his equals. Unlike a leader, he neither flattered nor snubbed anyone, and he preferred to keep people at a distance than to take the risk of [mutual] seduction. By his very existence, he contradicted all the bourgeoisie's propaganda, which -- before turning insurgent Parisian proletarians into piles of cadavers as tall as barricades -- began by painting them as a shapeless mass, as a brainless Plebian class of thieves, drunks, prison-escapees, headless devils, creatures that were unintelligible, monstrous and foreign to all humanity. And so: there is a logic of revolt. There is a science of insurrection. There is an intelligence in the riot, an idea of upheaval. It is necessary to have all the class-hatred of de Tocqueville to fail to recognize it.
"There then appeared in front of the tribunal a man who I only saw that one day, but whose memory has always filled me with disgust and horror. He had haggard and sunken cheeks, white lips, a sickly, wicked and unclean air, a dirty pallor, the bearing of a moldy body, apparently no underclothes, an old black frock coat gathered about thin and emaciated limbs. He seems to have lived in a cesspool and crawled out; one told me that this was Blanqui." (Souvenirs).
*
"Sink the Romantics!" These were Blanqui's first words, while he was still sweating, covered with gunpowder, at the end of the three days in July 1830. There is indeed a romantic feeling for life that extends down to us and even more profoundly infests our era than the previous century. Musset[11] codified it once and for all in 1836, in the first few pages of La Confession:
"A feeling of inexpressible malaise thus begins to ferment in all the young hearts. Condemned to rest by the sovereign of the world, delivered up to the pedants of all species, to idleness and boredom, the young people see recede from them the foaming waves against which they had prepared their arms (. . .) At the same time that the life of the beyond was so pale and petty, the inner life of society took on a somber and silent aspect; the most severe hypocrisy reigned in morals (. . .) This was like a denial of all things in heaven and on earth, which one could disenchantedly name despair, as if lethargic humanity had been thought dead by those who felt its pulse. In the same way that the soldier of yesteryear -- whom one had asked, "What do you believe in?" -- answered "In me," the youth of France would today say "In nothing.""
All that has been valuable in the last two centuries -- in all domains -- has been made against the romantic feeling for life, that is to say, by keeping it in mind. Lautreamont's Poesies, Chklovski's Lettres de non-amour, Deleuze and Parnel's Dialogues, and Gang Of Four's album Entertainment[12] mark out a front that includes Durruti's cold passion, Lenin's best intuitions, Italian feminism, Huey P. Newton's speeches, the urban guerrilla and the wind that blows through la villa Savoye.[13] All this reveals what we would, in opposition, call the Blanquist feeling for life. [His texts] L'Eternite par les astres and Instructions pour une prise d'armes[14] are the purest expression of it in this volume. Starting with what is here, and not with what is missing, with what (as they say) will default on the real. Never wait; operate with those who are there. Learn oneself, learn [other] beings and situations, not as entities, but as intersections [parcourus] of lines and planes, traversed by misfortunes [fatalites]. No afterlife, reveries, recriminations or explications. "One only consoles oneself too much." To renounce the idea of chaos, the simple mental transcription of renunciation -- "The shadow of chaos never existed, it will never exist, anywhere." Once what is there is accounted for, get organized. Do not recoil from any logical consequence. Those who speak of revolution without concerning themselves with the questions of arms and supplies already have cadavers in their hands.[13] Leave the questions of origin and finality to the metaphysicians; the here-and-now is our only starting point, and what we can do practically is our only serious goal. If the state of things is untenable, it is not because of this or that, but because I am powerless within it. Never oppose the necessities of thought and action. Remain firm in moments of ebb, when one must start again, alone, from the beginning: one is never alone with the truth. Such a way of being can find no excuse in the eyes of those for whom life is only a scholarly collection of justifications. Faced with this Blanquist way of being, resentment hurls invectives; it denounces "the taking of power" and "megalomania"; it erects its security corridors of bad faith, stupidity and contentment; it announces the banning of the monster that seems to be in the process of extricating itself from the human herd.
But when a sincere man, leaving aside the fantastic mirage of the programs and the mists of the Kingdom of Utopia, leaves the [romantic] novel to enter reality; when he speaks seriously and practically -- "Disarm the bourgeoisie, arm the people: these are the first necessities, the only signs of the health of the revolution" -- oh! then indifference vanishes and a long howl of fury resounds from one end of France to the other. Sacrilege! Patricide! Hydrophobia! There is rioting; the furies are unleashed upon that man; he is condemned to the infernal gods for having modestly spelled out the first words of common sense.
*
The partisans of waiting have always used the adjective "Blanquist" as an unanswerable insult. The purists among the anarchists use it as a synonym for "Jacobin," while the Stalinists used it as the equivalent of "anarchist." The cultivated imbeciles of the Encyclopedia of Nuisances,[16] who for twenty years have had the lucid courage to relentlessly bet on counter-revolution, have [also] spoken of the Unabomber's "imaginary Blanquism" so as to better dissociate it from his gestures, and thereby introduce their grossly falsified translation of his Manifesto.[17] Among Marxists, "Blanquist" is a synonym for "putschist" that denounces an avant-garde adventurism and a haste to get organized without due care for theory, while the masses are not always ready for it. All this surface confusion is of no interest. "Let's go! With patience, always! With resignation, never!" That is the Blanquist way. The alternative is not between waiting and activism, between participating in "social movements" and forming an avant-garde army; it is between being resigned or organized. A force can grow in an underground [sous-jacente] manner, according to its own rhythm, and can seize the time at the opportune moment. If the success of the October coup d'Etat had value for the Bolsheviks [in the form of] the admiration of a crowd of followers and opportunists of all nationalities, the unfortunate attempts of Blanqui -- surrounded with an evil aura -- at least had the merit of distancing him from this race of wood lice. In its text On the armed struggle in Western Europe, the Red Army Faction cites a passage from the famous article on partisan warfare written by Lenin: "In an era of civil war, the ideal of the party is a militarily engaged party (. . .) In the name of the principles of Marxism, we categorically demand that one does not dodge the analysis of the conditions of the civil war via cliches and worn-out phrases about anarchism, Blanquism and terrorism, and [we demand] that one does not come to discuss with us the scarecrow of certain absurd procedures applied by such and such organization in a war fought by partisans."
*
He who becomes absorbed in a destiny finds himself on equal footing with those who share it. The experience of friendship is the sweetest effect of such discipline. "I regard having made alliances and friendships with several hearts capable of great affection and great sacrifices like a conquest; it is an ability that everyone has." Just as love falls under the heading of the romantic cesspool, friendship belongs to Blanquist joy. It is that rare form of affection in which the horizon of the world does not disappear. Hannah Arendt says that "friendship is not intimately personal, but poses political requirements and remains oriented towards the world." Here beings belong to each other in a free state, that is to say, each belongs to the others as much as each always-already belongs to a destiny. If Cicero's Lelius foresees the dangers of secession that friendship poses to the City, it is because an unjust world, a detestable society, doesn't get forgotten in friendship as [it does] in the suffocating ecstasies of love. It still has the chance to orient itself against such a world, against such a society. To speak in blunt terms: today, all friendship is in some way at war with the imperial order or it is only a lie.
*
Lacambre, Tridon, Eudes, Granger, Flotte and the majority of Blanqui's co-conspirators were at first only friends who did not repress their latent politics. Conversely, all friendships have a conspiratorial kernel. In 1833, Vidocq[18] deplored the fact that there were more than a hundred secret societies in Paris. Any history of the revolutionary movement in France between 1830 and 1870 carries the trace of the societies that -- clubs as far as the regime would permit -- changed into hotbeds of clandestine propaganda or conspiracies when repression came and once again became clubs the moment that the regime vacillated. In 1848, there were no less than 600 [secret societies] in Paris, including -- to mention only one -- the club of l'Emeute revolutionnaire, located at 69 rue Mouffetard and presided over by Palanchan, an old accomplice of Blanqui. The official history of the workers movement has it that the conspiratorial tradition -- with its oaths, admission rituals and secret decorum -- succumbed during the development of the workers movement, though it had been its crucible. Did not the members of the League of the Just, ancestor of the League of the Communists, participate in the aborted insurrection of 1839, launched by the Society of the Seasons? Wasn't it Buonarroti who delivered the precious message of Babeuf to the modern world? Certainly one wasn't admitted to the so-called Revolutionary Communist League as one was admitted to the Association of Egalitarian Workers in 1839.
"Listen with confidence and without fear: you are with communist republicans and consequently you now begin to live in the era of equality. They will be your brothers if you are loyal to your oath, but you will be forever lost if you betray it. They have all sworn to it just as you have sworn to it. Always listen with the greatest attention: the community is the veritable republic: work in common, communal education, property and pleasure; it is the symbolic sun of equality, it is the new faith for which we have all sworn to die! We know no borders, boundaries, or homeland; all communists are our brothers; the aristocrats [are] our enemies. Today, if you fear prison, torture or death; if you find your courage to be weak; you should withdraw. To enter our ranks, one must confront all that: once the oath has been taken, your life belongs to us; you have risked your neck [19] and that of the one who will lead you for the rest of your days. Reflect and respond."
With the end of the era of conspiracies, the workers movement supposedly passed from its infantile to its adult phase, from night to light. At least according to Marxist historiography. The public organizations of Social Democracy took up the slack from shapeless proletarian politics. From the League of the Communists one proceeds by degrees to the International Association of Workers and the existence of Social Democrat Parties in all countries [of Europe], while the anarchists [supposedly] sank stupidly into terrorism and syndicalism. The truth is that conspiratorial politics never ended. [Supposedly] all the traditional links, all the familiarities based on trade and neighborhood -- the village, in short -- on which proletarian politics rested until the Commune have been irreversibly destroyed. And that the organizations that have substituted themselves for a thenceforth missing "people" have only demoted [repousser] the conspiratorial to "the informal" and have consequently de-ritualized all that depends upon friendship. At bottom, the conflict between Marx and Bakunin concerning the International and its alleged infiltration by an obscure International Alliance of Socialist Democracy (founded by Bakunin) came down to this: on the one side, a politics based on programs and, on the other, a politics founded on friendship. A Prussian, Karl Marx did not expect the sad end of the League of Communists due to his hatred of the politics of friends. His 1850 review of Chenu's book Les Conspirateurs already oozed pure hostility.[20]
"The entire lives of these professional conspirators are marked by the sign of Bohemia. Recruiting-sergeants for conspiracy, they shuffle from wine merchant to wine merchant, feeling the pulse of the workers, choosing their people, attracting them to [the] conspiracy by dint of cajoling them, and charging to the firm's account or their new friend the inevitable glasses that they themselves consume. In sum, the wine merchant may be consider the veritable fathers of their companionship (. . .) Due to a temperament that is very much shared by all Parisian proletarians, the conspirator doesn't delay becoming an accomplished "carouser" in this incessant tavern ambiance. The shady conspirator, who observes a rigid Spartan virtue in the secret sessions, suddenly loosens up and becomes someone who -- in the eyes of all the scholarly barflies -- knows how to appreciate wine and women. This tavern joviality is even more heightened by the constant dangers to which the conspirators are exposed: at any minute, he could be called to the barricades and perish there; at each step, the police lay traps for him that could lead to prison or even a galley ship. Such dangers precisely constitute the attraction of the trade: the greater the insecurity, the more the conspirator hastens to enjoy the pleasures of the moment. At the same time, the habituation to danger renders him completely indifferent to both life and liberty. He is as at home in prison as at a cabaret. Every day he expects to receive the order to go into action. The desperate rashness that manifests itself in every Parisian insurrection is precisely the contribution of these old professional conspirators, the henchmen. They are the ones who erect and command the first barricades, who organize resistance, lead the pillaging of armories, seize weapons and munitions, and carry out in full upheaval those audacious blows that so often throw the party in power into confusion."
Here one has a faithful description of the type of man that Bakunin was at the continental level. Bakunin, who could not in the course of his incessant transcontinental peripatetics encounter a being whom he liked without unloading upon him the statutes of his most recently formed secret society, hoping that he would adhere to what the Program and Object of the Secret Revolutionary Organization of the International Brothers calls a "kind of revolutionary [general] staff composed of individuals who are devoted, intelligent and sincere friends, especially; neither ambitious nor vain; of the people; capable of serving as the intermediary between the revolutionary idea[l] and working-class instincts. The number of these individuals thus most not be large. For the international organization in all of Europe, one hundred strongly and seriously allied revolutionaries would suffice." In truth, conspiratorial politics hasn't ceased to double all the organizational realities. In Spain, the FAI doubled the CNT, while its military office paid no attention to the Social-Democrat Workers Party in Russia. [in Russia,] Lenin was the only one up on the latest expropriation of Kamo, in 1912, [which worked] to the advantage of the Organization. [In Italy,] the "illegal work" commission of Potere Operaio[21] tasked itself with auto-financing, and [in France, it] was evoked by the constitution of the "invisible party." The party -- this is often forgotten -- has never ceased to be legal and illegal, visible and invisible, public and conspiratorial. It is one of the traits of the present that, at the moment we need all the resources of conspiratorial politics, we no longer understand anything about it. It is necessary, at any cost, to maintain the following epistemological principle: the history of he revolutionary movement is, first of all, the history of the links that make up its reality [qui font sa consistance].
*
Resentment's rationalizations have the art of inverting logical relations. For more than a century, and notably since The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, every event finds its explication among the slaves in a conspiracy by the powerful. The global petite bourgeoisie dote upon this literature, because it comforts its ignorance and powerlessness. The progression of conspiracism [complotisme] has everywhere followed the progression of this "class." In fact, the revelation that the powerful conspire against us only serves to mask evidence of the contrary: the power that is found in friendship and through conspiracy. In his preface to Histoire des Treize, Balzac[22] expresses as no one else the ambivalence of this power, which can return as aristocratic secession just as it can give birth to a revolutionary force.
"It happened that, under the Empire and in Paris, thirteen men equally struck by the same feeling, all endowed with a very great energy for being loyal to the same thought; quite honest amongst themselves due to never betraying each other; quite profoundly political so as to dissimulate the sacred links that unite them; strong enough to be above the law; bold enough to undertake anything; very happy for having almost always succeeded in their designs; having run the greatest dangers, but keeping quiet about their defeats; insusceptible to fear, and having never trembled before the prince, the executioner or innocence; having accepted each other, such as each was, without minding social prejudices (. . .) This world apart from the world, hostile to the world, accepted none of the ideas of the world, and recognized no law in it (. . .) This intimate union of superior people, cold and teasing, smiling and cursing in the midst of a false and petty society (. . .) Thus there were in Paris thirteen brothers who were their own masters and yet under-estimated in the world (. . .) There were no leaders nor followers; no one could arrogate power to himself; only the most vivid passion, only the most demanding circumstance, was the best. There were thirteen unknown kings, but real kings, and, more than kings, they were judges and executioners who -- organized into flanks that could traverse the entire country -- deigned to be something else, because they could be everything."
*
All of Blanqui's texts are circumstantial texts. They are driven by the conditions in which and against which they were written. It isn't until l'Eternite par les astres [1872] that the Fort du Taureau is mentioned. From whence comes the nonexistence of Blanqui's oeuvre, in the sense of something that includes an entire treasure. From whence also comes the absence of a Blanquist doctrine as there exists a Marxist metaphysics. "A little passion; doctrines later!" There is, nevertheless, a Blanquist style.
"Revolutions desire men who have faith in them. To doubt their triumphs is to already betray them. It is through logic and audacity that one launches them and saves them. If you lack these qualities, your enemies will have it over you; they will only see one thing in your weaknesses -- the measure of their own forces. And their courage will grow in direct proportion with your timidity."
Everything's there. Blanqui is the author of the phrase "Neither God, nor master," the man who wrote "Honest [reguliere] anarchy is the future of humanity," and the author of an appeal against mutualism and in favor of integral association entitled "Communism is the future of society." Go find an orthodoxy there. Of course, constructing a revolutionary force when overthrowing an administrative monarchy, when there is only an elite to put down, this can be the work of an elite. When Bismarck's armies marched on Paris, acting in a revolutionary way was "making barricades and digging trenches; assigning churches to national usages; arming the priests and, consequently, suppressing all cults; mandating enlistment; placing food in common and rationing it; dismissing and dispersing the former police forces; and denouncing suspects and Bonapartists" (Dommanget, Blanqui [1972]). in current society, in which power circulates within the flows of nourishment, information and medicines; in which citizens take advantage of their rights to call the cops; it goes without saying that a revolutionary force must embrace all aspects of existence; it must be constructed as a force of supply-provisioning and as an armed force, as a power that is both poetic and medical; and it must seize territories. It must collect all useful intelligence about the adversary's organization and provoke desertions in all ranks of society. It must socialize itself to the same extent that the social becomes military. But no more than yesterday: things can't wait. Such a force is in the process of being constituted. If this force closely studies Blanqui, it is only to better understand the war in progress.
*
Time passes. That is its nature. As long as there is time, there will be boredom, and time passes. The past does not pass. All that has really passed carries in itself a spark of eternity; it is inscribed in some nook of communal experience. One can efface the traces, but not the event. One can indeed pulverize the memory, [but] each piece of debris contains the total monad of what one believed to have been destroyed and will engender it anew, when the opportunity arises. We repeat: historicism is a brothel in which one takes care that the clients never believe [the illusion]. The past is not a succession of dates, deeds or modes of living; it is not a closet full of costumes; it is a reservoir of forces and gestures, a proliferation of existential possibilities. Knowledge of it is not necessary; it is simply vital. Vital for the present. It is from the present that one comprehends the past, not the reverse. Each era dreams its predecessors. The loss of all historical meaning -- like the loss of all meaning in general -- in our era is the logical corollary of the loss of all experience. The systematic organization of forgetting doesn't at all distinguish itself from the systematic loss of experience. The most demented form of historical revisionism, which now manages to apply itself even to contemporary events, finds it compost in the suspended life of the metropolises, where one never experiences anything, except for [all] the signs, signals and codes, and their padded conflicts. Where one has experiences, private/tame experiences that float, mute, unwrittable and empty; implosive intensities that cannot be communicated beyond the walls of an apartment and that any narrative would empty out more than it shares. It is under the form of its privatization that the deprivation of experience expresses itself the most communally.
*
December 2006.[23] The ship of state is taking on water everywhere. Soon it will only be a look-out post. France burns and shipwrecks. This is good. It revives memories. The schools on fire burn in memory of the generations of proletarians who therein experienced the bitter taste of timetables, work and obedience, and incorporated the feeling of complete inferiority. Those who no longer vote honor the insurgents of June 1848 -- that "revolt by rebellious angels who have not arisen since then" (Coeurderoy) -- whom one put to the bayonet in the name of universal suffrage. The leftist intellectuals [of today] wonder on the radio if the government has the courage to send the army into the banlieus, just as their ancestors [who in the early 1960s] applauded the generals who, upon returning from Algeria, massacred Parisian proletarians, though the generals had gotten into the habit of "civilizing" the indigenous people [of that country]. Today as yesterday, this species of skunk calls himself republican and speaks of "the rabble." The imprisoned members of Action Directe have long ago surpassed their mandatory-minimum sentences. Regis Schleicher[24] soon will compete with Blanqui for length of incarceration. More than ever, the army trains for urban warfare. In France, the historical clock is stuck at May 1871. The question of communism is invisibly the only question that haunts all social relations, even porn. The universe fidgets in place. Last March 31st, a wild demonstration of 4,000 people lasts more than eight hours: from the intervention of the president of this senile Republic -- he came on TV to announce that the CPE would be maintained -- to four o'clock in the morning. The demonstration wants to go to the Eylsee, oblique to la Concorde sur l'Assemblee national, which it fails to approach [investir] due to lack of materials and weapons -- same thing for the Senate.
At the edges of the march, determination grows. A martial scansion is heard at the door: "Paris! Get up, wake up!" It is an order. On the Boulevard de Sebastopol, then at de Magenta, the windows of the banks and interim-job agencies begin to fall, one after the other, methodically. Prostitutes at Pigalle salute from a window. The crowd mounts le Sacre-Coeur to cries of "Vive la Commune!" The door to the crypt does not budge; what a shame, one could have burnt it down. Descending to a small street, a lady in a baby-doll outfit leans on her third-floor balcony and yells at the top of her voice, "The bad days will end."[25] The permanently-open office of the vile Pierre Lellouche[26] will soon be sacked. It is three o'clock in the morning. The past does not pass. The burning of Paris will be the worthy completion of Baron Haussmann's destruction.

(Signed "Some Agents of the Imaginary Party," this text was published as the preface to Dominiqu Le Nuz's collection of texts by Blanqui entitled Maintenant, il faut des arms, published by Editions La Fabrique in 2007. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! 26 May 2009.)

[1] Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881) was a French insurrectionist.
[2] Unlike Zarathustra and Heliogabale, Gilles de Rais was a real person. But it is true that, for Georges Bataille, author of The Trial of Gilles de Rais, (original 1965, translated by Richard Robinson, 1991), de Rais was more (evil) than just a "mere" man.
[3] Gustave Lefrancais (1826-1901) was a French anarchist.
[4] Uncited quotations are phrases from Blanqui.
[5] Letter dated 6 June 1852.
[6] See Dionys Mascolo's preface to collection of Saint-Just's writings published by Gallimard in 1968.
[7] Surhomme in French and uber Mensch in German.
[8] To fasten, make firm, establish.
[9] Benjamin Flotte.
[10 Jules Valles, L'Insurge, published post-humously in 1886.
[11] Alfred de Musset, The Confession of a Child of the Century (1836).
[12] Released in 1979, this album is strongly influenced by the Situationist International.
[13] A "machine for living" (a house) designed by Le Corbusier in Poissy, France, between 1928 and 1931.
[14] The Instructions for an armed uprising was first published in 1866, while Eternity through the stars was published in 1872.
[15] A detournement of a famous phrase by Raoul Vaneigem: "People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and positive in the referral of constraint, have corpses in their mouths." A great deal could be said about this detournement: 1) it removes love from the subversive equation; 2) it re-territorializes a remark from Vaneigem, whom Guy Debord once criticized for his "Blanquism" (see letter to Mustapha Khayati dated 13 November 1965); and 3) it reminds us of Debord's complete absence from this text on Blanqui, in particular, the following highly relevant remarks from Debord's Comments on the Society of the Spectacle.
"The notion of acceptable political crime only became recognized in Europe once the bourgeoisie had successfully attacked previously established social structures. The nature of political crime could not be separated from the diverse intentions of social critique. This was true for Blanqui, Varlin, Durruti. Nowadays there is a pretense of wishing to preserve a purely political crime, like some inexpensive luxury, a crime which doubtless no one will ever have the occasion to commit, since no one is interested in the subject any more; except for the professional politicians themselves, whose crimes are rarely pursued, nor for that matter no longer called political. All crimes and offenses are effectively social. But of all social crimes, none must be seen as worse than the impertinent pretension to still want to change something in this society, which thinks that it has only been only too kind and patient, but which no longer wants to be blamed."
[16] The Encyclopedia of Nuisances was founded as a group and a journal in 1984 by Jaime Semprun, Christian Sebastiani and others, in response to the murder of Gerard Lebovici, the editor of Editions Champ Libre. It began a publishing house in 1993.
[17] The EdN published a translation of the Unabomber's allegedly anarchist manifesto, "Industrial Society and Its Future," in 1999.
[18] Eugene Francois Vidocq (1775-1857) was a French criminal who became a police spy.
[19] The French here is tu es engage sur ta tete (literally, "you are engaged on your head").
[20] This review by Marx is available on-line in an English translation. Ironically, this website -- "Marxist," though it is -- is the best on-line resource for Blanqui's writings in translation.
[21] Potere Operaio ("Workers Power") was an Italian group active between 1968 and 1973.
[22] Honore de Balzac, Histoire des Treize: Ferragus, chef des devorants, XIII, 13.
[23] In the midst of spirited protests against the rescinding of the CPE (Contrat Premiere Embauche).
[24] Regis Schleicher, a member of Action Directe, was sentenced to life in prison in 1986.
[25] "The Bad Days Will End" was the title of an essay published in April 1962 by the Situationist International, and also the title of a film made by Thomas Lacoste in 2008.
[26] A right-wing French politician, born in 1951 and, one way or another, in power since 1993.


source: http://www.notbored.org/blanqui.html