"Invisible Politics - An Introduction to Contemporary Communisation" by John Cunningham

In the wake of the organised left and the demise of working class self-identity, communisation offers a paradoxical means of superseding capitalism in the here and now whilst abandoning orthodox theories of revolution. John Cunningham reports from the picket line of the ‘human strike'.


As we apprehend it, the process of instituting communism can only take the form of a collection of acts of communisation, of making common such-and-such space, such-and-such-machine, such-and-such-knowledge. - The Invisible Committee, Call, 2004

The critique of capital, and speculation around the form and content of communism, always seems to oscillate between a historical materialist science on the one hand and the elaboration of new forms of subjectivity and affectivity on the other. Even Marx, while infinitely more familiar as a close analyst of capital, had early moments of Fourier style abandon when he attempted to elaborate the more mutable subjective content of a communist society. The dissolution of wage labour would make

it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner...[ii]

This suggests a society wherein circuits of affectivity are established that are no longer based upon the exigencies of value production - even if I personally prefer communist utopia as idleness to Marx's endless activity. Of course, this is one of the rare instances where Marx speaks in the future tense, leaving aside the messiness of the transition from capitalism. Recently, a series of texts from the milieu around the French journal Tiqqun - primarily Call, How is to be done?, The Coming Insurrection - have reintroduced this question of the subjective content of communism in a way that might restore a speculative aspect to the critique of capital.[iii] These are not theoretical texts per se, more inspirational ‘How To' manuals for the elaboration of communisation as subjective and conceptual secession from both capital and the Left. As Call states, ‘Nothing can happen that does not begin with a secession from everything that makes this desert grow.'[iv] This discursive distance from the more traditional ultra-left positions on communisation is also reflected in dense, poetic prose that establishes an affinity with possible precursors in revolt such as Dada, Surrealism and Bataille. The development of the thesis of communisation within the ultra-left was always part of an attempt to shift away from the traditional programmatic forms of the party and the union towards an engagement with forms of resistance rising immanently from the social relation of capital, such as wildcat strikes. What might be at stake in a restating of the question of communisation as radical subjectivist secession against the often discredited ideological formulas of anti-capitalist milieus?

It's best to consider this question alongside the series of texts presented by Endnotes that ably document the continued elaboration of communisation within the French ultra-left by presenting a series of texts by Gilles Dauvé and Theorie Communiste.[v] Both are rooted in the diverse groupuscles of the French far left in the 1970's that shared a fidelity to 1968 of whom Debord and the Situationists remain the most renowned.[vi] Dauvé and Theorie Communiste retain a commitment to communisation but diverge sharply around questions of agency and history. What remains under-theorised in both Dauvé's humanist Marxism and Theorie Communiste's more recently formulated Marxist structuralism is any real problematisation of the production of subjectivity within capital. An insertion of this question might illuminate the impasse faced by these more hermetic theoretical critiques of capital. In sketching out the contours of contemporary theories of communisation, a constellation composed of questions around subjectivity, negation, history and utopia emerges. Does a reconsideration of communisation open up new perspectives and different possibilities, given the gap between the cramped space revolutionary milieus find themselves in and any genuine expectations of radical change? Or is even discussing communisation at this time akin to scraping a toothache with a fingernail, pointless utopianism in the face of the constantly mutating social relation of capital?

Before answering this question, though, what is communisation? The term immediately evokes various social experiments and revolutionary endeavours from the Paris Commune and utopian socialist communities in the 19th century through to various counter-cultural attempts to reconstitute social relations on a more communitarian basis such as the squatting scene in the 1970s and '80s. The Tiqqun strand - henceforth to be known as ‘The Invisible Committee' after the eponymous signatories of The Coming Insurrection - draws upon this long history of secessionist antagonism. They posit communisation as essentially being the production, through the formation of ‘communes', of collective forms of radical subjectivity. This destabilises the production of subjectivity and value within both capital and more traditional forms of political organisation, eventually leading to an insurrectionary break. ‘Commune' in this instance is not necessarily a bunch of hippies aspiring to a carbon free life style. In The Coming Insurrection a commune is almost anything that ‘seeks to break all economic dependency and all political subjugation', ranging from wildcat strikes to Radio Alice in Bologna in 1977, and innumerable other forms of collective experimentation.[vii]

Limits of Terror: On Culture Industry, Enforcement and Revolution by Gene Ray

Excerpt:

These reflections suggest that a break with the master logic of accumulation entails disarming the technocratic national security-surveillance state, and above all the US war machine that is the main enforcer of the global imperialist process. To put it more pointedly: without disarmament, the prospect of emancipating system change is nill. Possibilities for transformation would increase in pace with progressive disarmament, however, and indeed the latter would measure the former. If this is so, then struggles will be strategic only insofar as they articulate themselves with anti-militarist struggles and make their own the aim of dismantling state war machines. Disarmament implies confronting the neo-imperialist state and need not be naïvely pacifist, but obviously this confrontation cannot take the form of a suicidal war of annihilation. Total struggle, mirroring total war, is terminal: pursued without limit or reserve it becomes the terror it aims to fight. And yet effective struggles need to be grounded in everyday experience; they are robust and resilient insofar as they are lived fully and vividly, pulsing beyond a mere convenience emptied of risk. The tight-wires of practice are strung under tension across these aporias. In our world of normalized emergency, the desire to be liberated from fear and terror is the long, gently bowed balancing pole of sanity.
   
The traversing refusal of imposed fear and terror has clear aims to struggle for: the immediate cessation of all military occupations and interventions and the permanent closure of the global network of neo-imperialist military bases and spy stations that supports them; the global abolition of nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction, without exception; the radical reduction of military spending and the redirection of these funds to the urgent amelioration of social misery. Every real step toward these aims would already be radical change. And only by passing through them can struggles for autonomy, happiness and the liberation of nature have their chance to survive and grow fruitful. There is no liberation within the politics of fear: liberation as such begins and is coextensive with liberation from state terror.

This essay is a part from a special issue of Brumaria on "Revolution and Subjectivity", out in December 2010 (The other contributors are Alain Badiou, Alex Callinicos, Simon Critchley, Barbara Epstein, John Bellamy Foster, David Harvey, John Holloway, Domenico Losurdo,  Michael Löwy, Milos Petrovic, Antonio Negri, Alberto Toscano and Slavoj Žižek). The whole essay is posted here in Void Mirror.

more info about Brumaria: http://www.brumaria.net/publicaciones

Limits of Terror:
On Culture Industry, Enforcement and Revolution

by Gene Ray

‘Enjoy your precarity!’ This is the command behind the bubbling ideological re-descriptions and compensating revalorizations of the so-called creative industries. If such a command is to stick, it needs appeal, allure, mystique. The figure of the artist as creative rebel, dusted off and shined up, seems to do the trick. In the new imaginaries of post-Fordist cognitive capitalism, the old categories of autonomy and creativity are jolted back to life and luster. On the subjective level, it’s all about moods, fantasies and libidinal investments. Self-exploitation can be hip, if deep knee-bends are performed to an appropriate sound track. It really is possible to find freedom in unfreedom, correct living in the false, if only you look for it in the new and approved ways. How much potential for resistance comes with these shifted productive relations and this readjusted subject of labor is a matter of some dispute.

"Power, Propaganda, and Purpose in American Democracy" by Andrew Gavin Marshall

One central facet to the development of the modern institutional society under which we live and are dominated today, was the redefining of the concept of ‘democracy’ that took place in the early 20^th century.

This immensely important discussion took place among the educated, elite intellectual class in the United States at that time, and the consequences of which were profound for the development of not only American society and democracy, but for the globalization that followed after World War II.

The central theme that emerged was that in the age of ‘mass democracy’, where people came to be known as “the public,” the concept of ‘democracy’ was redefined to be a system of government and social organization which was to be managed by an intellectual elite, largely concerned with “the engineering of consent” of the masses in order to allow elite-management of society to continue unhindered.

The socio-economic and political situation of the United States had, throughout the 19^thcentury, rapidly changed.

Official slavery was ended after the Civil War and the wage-slave method of labour was introduced on a much wider scale; that is, the approach at which people are no longer property themselves, but rather lend their labour at minimal hourly wages, a difference equated with rental slavery versus owned slavery.

While the system of labour had itself changed, the living conditions of the labourers did not improve a great deal. With Industrialization also came increased urbanization, poverty, and thus, social unrest.

The 19^th Century in the United States was one of near-constant labour unrest, social upheaval and a rapidly growing wealth divide. And it was not simply the lower labouring classes that were experiencing the harsh rigors of a modern industrial life. One social critic of the era, writing in 1873, discussed the situation of the middle class in America:

Very few among them are saving money. Many of them are in debt; and all they can earn for years, is, in many cases, mortgaged to pay such debt… [We see] the unmistakable signs of their incessant anxiety and struggles to get on in life, and to obtain in addition to a mere subsistence, a standing in society… The poverty of the great middle classes consists in the fact that they have only barely enough to cover up their poverty… their poverty is felt, mentally and socially, through their sense of dependence and pride. They must work constantly, and with an angry sense of the limited opportunities for a career at their command.[1]

As immigrants from Europe and Asia flooded America, a growing sense of racism emerged among the faltering middle class. This situation created enormous tension and unease among middle and working class Americans, and indeed, the industrialists who ruled over them.

Yet many in the middle class viewed the lower class, which was increasingly rebellious, as well as the immigrant labourers – also quite militant – as a threat to their own standing in society. Instead of focusing primarily on the need for reorganization at the top of the social structure, they looked to the masses – the working people – as the greatest source of instability.

Their approach was in attempting to preserve – or construct – a system beneficial to their own particular interests. Since the middle class survived on the backs of the workers, it was not in their interest as a class to support radical workers movements and revolutionary philosophies. Thus, while criticizing those at the top, the call came for ‘reform’, not revolution; for passive pluralism not democratic populism; for amelioration, not anarchy.

"Digital Culture and Sustainability" by Michel Bauwens

The Rio+20 mandate recognizes three pillars of sustainable development – the economic, the social and the environmental. However, the process does not challenge the fundamental toxicity of the current operating system, and ignores that such a ‘faulty’ DNA has strong culture roots.




What do we mean? The following is not based on the stated ideals of Rio+20 but rather on the actual practice of the really existing economic system.


The current global system is based on three erroneous premises:


1. the first premise is that nature is an infinite resource that can be exploited without regard for its regenerative capacity.


The results of this culture of natural exploitation are devastating. In 2009, Johan Rockström and a group of leading Earth-system scientists# proposed a set of nine fundamental processing affecting the overall health of the planet (like freshwater use, climate regulation, and the nitrogen cycle), and after calculating a safe operating zone for each of them, concluded humanity had overstepped the bounds of at least three of them. Putting excessive stress on these critical processes could lead to tipping points of abrupt and irreversible environmental change, in addition to the well-studied climate change effects. The 2010 Living Planet Report finds we are currently using 1.5 Earths and are projected to be using 2 Earths by 2030 under “business as usual” conditions#. Linking these type of data together, and calculating their interconnection (for example: less oil means less fertilizers means less agricultural production), Graham Turner and a team of MIT scientists produced a series of computer models leading to disquieting conclusions and a clear timeframe: “The business-as-usual scenario estimated that if human beings continued to consume more than nature was capable of providing, global economic collapse and precipitous population decline could occur by 2030.


2. artificial scarcity


The second principle of our current operating system is that sharing innovation is basically an illegal activity. Scientific and technological advances are privatized through patents and copyrights, which are often monopolized by large companies which may have a vested interest in slowing down technological innovation that threatens them. Young and old people are under attack of the courts and the police for sharing cultural expressions, even though those that share the most are also the best ‘clients’ of the cultural industry. Many aspects of sharing are illegal. Jane Orsi of the Sustainable Law Development Center in San Francisco has given examples of how many U.S. states forbid: 1) gardening in front of your house: 2) collecting free rainwater; 3) drying your clothes in the sun; 4) making marmelade for your neighbours. The system is rigged against sharing.


3. social imbalance


The first and second aspect are combined with a total disregard for equity and social justice, which are increasing, not decreasing. For example, Oxfam calculated that of 11 social foundations for the sustainability of human society, 8 of them were deteriorating#.


Such a fundamental anti-natural and anti-social operating system needs fundamental restructuring, based on a value inversion that can only be rooted in new cultural practices.


It has happened before. At the end of the Roman Empire, the cultural revolution spurred by the Christian communities re-embedded the runaway power system back into the moral authority of a spiritual community. In 1789, feudal privileges were abolished in one single day, as they had become anathema to the new sensibility.


Today we see the birth of a new culture of sharing and cooperation that is not just mutualizing knowledge, but also material resources, and aims to turn our operating system ‘upside down’, to a new configuration where the externalities of nature are respected, the sharing of culture, science and innovation becomes the norm, and both of these changes generate a more just social order.


These new cultural revolution takes on many different forms. In the collaborative production of knowledge, as achieved by Wikipedia; in the sharing of software code, as exemplified by the Linux Operating System, and in the sharing of open designs for distributed production, such with Wikispeed and Arduino. The new culture is born in the horizontal socialization that is effected through the internet, and leads to natural collaboration around the creation of common value.


For this new culture, it is copyright that is theft, as it takes away the enjoyment of a abundant good. For us, it is unethical to withhold medicines from poor people who cannot afford to pay the superprofits that come from intellectual property. For us, it is unethical to withold to the world and nature the benefits of a design for an electric car, or a solar generator. The new culture and emerging generations are building business models and enterpreneurial forms that respect the limits of nature and promote the sharing of innovations. No open design community wants to design for planned obsolescence.


All this activity is not rooted in a stress on economic logics, but on a culture and practice of sharing that is strongly linked to our cultural life. Mass movements like the Occupy and the Indignados, are a direct expression of the culture of sharing through social media; and the German Pirate Party, which is credited with 10% of the vote in the next elections, are directly rooted in the music filesharing communities in Sweden. In Brazil, Fora do Eixo is an example of a successful artistic network whose economic practices derive from the new values of sharing and cooperation.


Our new politics, our new economics, are born from a culture of sharing, and from new forms of socialization and creating common meaning and value.


Any approach which denies that a cultural revolution is the prerequisite for more fundamental change, denies the value of human intentionality and sociality, and is bound to fail in its ambitions for change. This is why culture is the absolutely indispensable fourth pillar of sustainablility. Not an add-on, but the source from which the other changes proceed. It is through culture that we change our vision of the world, both the existing one, which increasingly shocks our ethical sensibilities, and the one that we are co-constructing to replace it.




About the author: Founder of Foundation for Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Alternatives. Works in collaboration with a global group of researchers exploring peer production, governance and property. Co-producer of FrankThey’s documentary TechnoCalyps, an analysis about the ‘metaphysics of technology’. Bauwens is currently a visiting professor at the University of Amsterdam, and also founding member of the Commons Strategies Group, community that defends the commons.

This entry was posted in Unconference 

An Open Letter to Everyone who Thinks I’m a Worthless Lazy Bastard

First of all, don’t be so harsh.  There’s a lot of terrible things in this world and someone not working isn’t one of them.  Actually, you’ve got to be a hard worker to accomplish anything really bad.  The Nazis were hard workers.  And hardcore criminals doing all that running around, I don’t have the nerve for it.  I’m simpler than a bump on a stump but I took a test one time that said I’m in the top %90 of people in MENSA.  I’ve met lots of people drinking under bridges that are that smart, too.  Maybe being simple isn’t so stupid, and that’s why I see so many things other people don’t.  Lots of butterflies this last spring, but I’m the only one who said anything.  No one else ever sees eagles or hawks until I point them out.  I’m not saying I’m great, I’m just saying that’s all I care about, and that’s why I’m lazy.

I work hard when I find something worth working for.  Building a shelter to sleep in that can last the rain and wind, making a walking stick that will last me a few years.  I dance harder than anyone I know.  These things get me working because they have meaning.  I like to laugh, and learn about the things people have been talking about for centuries.  I don’t care about the latest research into quantum physics, give me a good Taoist poem from 423AD, or a good verse from the Bible, or some good anarchist propaganda.  I’ll sink into myself and chew it over for hours like a Mexican on a siesta.  Although I heard they don’t have siesta any more in Spain, because there’s too much work to do, which is why I don’t do it.  Hell, I’ll sit for hours doing nothing at all but buzzing to myself about this or that.  Sitting in silence, that’s even older than the Bible, and they were a lot better off back then.  Plenty of space, endless wilderness to explore, simple meaningful lives.  That’s the good stuff, but there’s nowhere to do it anymore.  Just being born isn’t good enough to be on this earth, you gotta bust your hump for ten times umpteen trillion hours a week for year after year after year just to get a couple acres of land (on the windy side of a godforsaken hill if you’re lucky).  I resent that land isn’t free for the taking.  How are we free if it isn’t free to just do nothing in one place for a while?  It’s pay to stay in America.

I love the working people, they’re all good for the most part.  But I see they’re at the end of their strings.  I look at my family and they’re frayed like dead rope and wound up like hungry dogs.  Even my young friends, what do they have to
look forward to?  So much paperwork they’ll need iPods to do their signature!  I take some kind of pride when I choose to write my name down, and it’s rare that I do, like it’s rare that I photograph.  It has to be a moment.  If I go to the bank I feel like a very official man, it’s not just a round in the washer for me.

People hardly work for any of the good stuff in life.  A better way to waste the hours, iPods and iPads and blast-your-head-off game boys, all that shit.  But I see a lot of people who work for nothing but good food and good times.  That’s the way to work.  But how do I get a job when I’ve been living in the woods for three months on end?  It’s impossible.  Even when I clean up I look dirty.  Every time I get some good clean boots or jeans or a new shirt I go on a nice long hike through the brush and they look (and smell) a year old after just a day with me!  And besides, everything’s tanking, and it’ll probably just get worse until there’s no work for people but trying to scratch some corn out of the grooves in the sidewalk.  So the way I see it, I’m on the cutting edge.  This thing can’t last forever, it’s brand new and failing fast.  The old ways will make a comeback if we don’t kill the whole planet first.  If there’s even anything left when we get there.  I hope America with all its stinking McDonalds and Chevrons withers back to DC and STAYS THERE.  It’s got no right to be way out here across so many mountains and prairies and valleys that I couldn’t shake hands with the president if I set my life on it.  Trying to tell all our friends and family what to do with their lives and making it harder than hell if they don’t do it just right.  It’s not fair, everyone has to worry about messing up their credit all the time or screwing up their maybe promotion, just so they can have a dry safe place and food for their kids.  And no one ever told them it’s just one way to live, and everyone is free by right of life to do whatever the hell they please.

The American Way will kill you, if you’re lucky.  If you’re not you’ll just get sick and have to take pills that make you sicker.  Or you’ll go to jail and leave all your life abandoned for nothing maybe.  I’ve gone to jail for riding trains, sleeping under trees, and above all not going to court.  They’ll put you away for that little stuff, especially not going to court, and that’s as good as taking your life.  They think that the death sentence is just a lethal injection, but that’s not so bad.  They just free your spirit.  But making you live without life, when life is nothing but what you love and care for, that’s the death sentence.  Jail is worse than death.  Maybe.  And maybe life these days is worse than that.  But my point is the whole thing is tragic.  If it’s gotta be like this for some people then at least let me have it my way too.  I aint hurting anyone, I like things to grow and laugh and be healthy.  I just don’t like to work.

Thomas Elpel feels the same way, read his article The Art of Nothing.  And read The Heart Sutra, doin’ nothin’ aint so bad, maybe it’s even holy.

source:

 http://ouroborosponderosa.wordpress.com/2011/11/18/an-open-letter-to-everyone-who-thinks-im-a-worthless-lazy-bastard/

Adorno, Brecht and Debord: Three Models for Resisting the Capitalist Art System by Gene Ray

This essay outlines three modes or models of radical cultural practice. Each begins with a critical appropriation of the traditions of art and aims at resisting the social power that passes through art, as an institutionalized field of production and activity. Each of the three modes establishes a set of productive strategies. Together, they are the three historically demonstrated and available models for resisting the political neutralization of art and for challenging the power of the capitalist art system. For convenience, I link each model with a name or names closely associated with it. They are, first, Adorno’s dissonant modernism epitomized by Kafka and Beckett. Second, Brecht’s “functional transformation” or “re-functioning” of institutions through estrangement and dialectical realism. And third, Debord’s Situationist détournement of art, aiming to rupture and decolonize naturalized everyday life. Each model works on a different level of social reality. Each produces different kinds of effects at different points or moments of the social process, and is affected differently in turn by the global conjuncture of struggle. Typically, the advocates of one model treat the others dismissively; there is, we know, a long history of rancorous debate regarding their relative merits. I doubt the rancor is still needed or helpful today. Each of the models is still capable of generating radically critical and resistant effects. While these effects are different in kind, they can all contribute something to a culture opposed to capital. None of the three models should be discarded, so long as their strategies can still be realized. Here I briefly outline each, before discussing their relative strengths, advantages and limitations.
Some general remarks. We are evidently stuck in a global social process dominated by the logic of capital accumulation. Art, obviously, isn’t going to deliver us from that. The passage beyond capitalist relations is a matter of struggle, however that’s conceived. Art remains a dominated field of activity, and thinking about its possible contributions to radical social transformation has to begin by situating art within the global social process that dominates it. Very briefly: art is a field that is organized and saturated by capitalist power. There very clearly is a capitalist art system, with its rules, conventions and institutions, relations and tendencies, enjoyments and enforcements, and so on. Seen dialectically, what happens within this system does have its utopian and critical moments. As long as such moments are not utterly excluded, we have to acknowledge art’s relative autonomy and oppositional use-value. Art is not utterly reducible to exchange value and affirmative social functions. But it is also clear enough that the administered art system channels the activity of art as a whole in ways that are affirmative and stabilizing. This has been well-marked and elaborated: art in sum contributes to the reproduction of the given global process. The question is what specific works or practices may be able to do within and against it.
The first two models, Adorno’s dissonant modernism and Brecht’s re-functioning of institutions, operate within the existing art system. In different ways, both accept this dominated nexus of institution and tradition as a valid field for a practice that resists it. The third model, Debord’s Situationist intransigence, refuses to participate in the administered art system and takes up a position outside it.

Today we hear claims that the character of art has been fundamentally altered under post-Fordism or “creative capitalism.” Some still want to collapse art into the culture industry, others to dissolve it into a general technics of subjectivation or a “distribution of the sensible.” I haven’t found any of these approaches convincing. Art may have gained some additional affirmative social functions as the global process has unfolded. But I doubt these essentially change the double character of art under capitalism. There is still a capitalist art system that grants art a relative autonomy. This being so, certain positions and strategies are immanent to art as a social process: they reflect the contradictions and antagonisms of art under capitalism. As the demonstration of these positions and strategies, these three models remain available for artists to appropriate and reinvent – and will remain so as long as the capitalist art system persists.

The State, Capital and Representation* by kpbsfs

Occasionally, the liberal-democratic system nobly affords us the chance to select our representatives from a shallow gene-pool of political management professionals. Save for this transient moment in the ballot booth, we’re separated from the exclusive franchise of governance altogether – voting is our only momentary and tenuous connection to the establishment. Best to leave power and responsibility up to the professionals; the experts, the think-tanks, policy-wonks, lobbyists and journalists. Just like any other specialised industry, with its own internal contradictions and power-relationships, the ‘political class’ is not a homogenised elite, united in a conspiratorial desire to oppress, control or get rich, but all of the actors in the political spectacle are moulded from the same clay. You see it as they slither through primaries and caucuses, TV spots and talk shows, ‘serious’ interviews and light-hearted features in glossy magazines, vying for the approval of a populace that has long since lost interest and learnt to take everything they say with a pinch of salt. The very existence of centralised government necessarily prefigures an exclusion, a separation, a surrendering of power for those who are not part of the political elite. Decision-making powers are delegated to the salaried statesmen, to be enacted by faceless and impenetrable bureaucracies – apparently the most efficient way to conduct the affairs of a modern, technological civilization – a self-perpetuating, self-propeling cycle of social reproduction, a mechanical propagation of the suited and enterprising class – the partisans of their own careers – in a true technocratic marvel. Their interests overlapping with the needs of capital, each greasing the wheels of the other, they form part of a giant social machine characterised by near total harmony between the state and the propertied classes. This does not presuppose a monolithic conception of government or capital as two united and homogenous units, but the interplay of differing interests within these bodies strengthens their grip on power, their sham plurality is the hallmark of representative democracy. But no-one in government is arguing over the fundamentals, they come together in a coefficient of affinity with varying levels – the party lines only differ in degree, like a choice between Pepsi and Pepsi-lite. Policy-makers nit-pick over the finer details but preserve the core, and in the wider population, in opinion polls, national elections and everyday conversation, ‘everyone is asked their opinion about every detail in order to prevent them having one about the totality.’ And so we’re left with a set of choices; pointless policy debates over taxation, budgets, bail-outs, bonuses, regulation – everything on the agenda is a set piece of fine-tuning and tweaking but never questioning the legitimacy of the whole - the social machine in its entirety. The boundaries are immediately set in stone and the possibilities limited, all alternatives positioned very much within the system, mounted comfortably within the discourses of the big government ‘left’ or the arch-capitalists of the right, until the most ardent anarchists start smashing windows in the name of welfare-statism – the strange spectacle of a black bloc protesting against government spending cuts. It is this reciprocity, the binary antagonism between two models of capitalism that furnishes the system with its ability to evolve, adapt and flow through crises and traumas. It is a mutually beneficial false opposition, a false dichotomy between interconnecting forces that are always the same in essence. Wasn’t the enfranchisement of the workers meant to herald a period of parliamentary socialism, even proletarian dictatorship? Who then could see the dynamics of representation and power? Elections and suffrage are no threat to networks of coercive power and domination, on the contrary, they are complimentary to it; they are its lifeblood and its pacemaker enabling its perpetual flows and transformations, its moral crutch to fall back on and its facelift signifying freedom, choice and liberty. Voting allows the system its pretensions. A great popularity contest to choose our masters, just as we would choose our school’s class monitors to make us more forgiving of the teacher’s cane. But we know the nature of representation; a refined manipulation and a gross con, yielding our own powers and potentialities to gangs of grinning, air-brushed thugs, to administer our own enslavement, to supervise and manage our own disenfranchisement with our mandate and our approval – ‘participation in our own alienation.’ The capitalist social machine has become so omnipotent and omnipresent that it demands our participation. There is no escape when every last corner of the world has been colonised by a tidal wave of nullity. We have no choice but to engage in capital’s grand theatre or live as hermits, retreating into self-indulgent madness. Every time we consume or produce (apparently we now vote with our purchasing power) we are party to the system, we inscribe ourselves on the social apparatus and prolong it further into posterity. The anarchist is no more a pretender in the polling station than in the supermarket. Far from screaming, ‘Rock the Vote’ and ‘Vote or Die’, or even encouraging a pragmatic approach to elections, we are pointing out that we are all collaborators, complicit in the maintenance of established systems of authority, and in our current decrepit situation whether we abstain, spoil the ballot or boycott, we still remain powerless to detach ourselves from capital’s yoke. What is to be done when we are faced, like the French in 2002, with a choice between a fascist and a reactionary old Gaullist? This kind of situation must be left up to people’s individual consciences. Our dilemma is how to built a decentralised, participatory and horizontal network of power outside the state and representative, mediating institutions and without haranguing, hijacking and recuperating by whatever special interests. This is no mean feat. But there can be no more dead-end election campaigns or membership drives, no more misplaced faith in the ability of government to do things they are incapable of doing, and no more seduction by the public relations men for the one candidate who ‘seems different to the rest’. K.P.B.S.F.S. *A version of this will appear in the Summer 2012 edition of Fifth Estate www.fifthestate.org
 FOUND atQ http://kpbsfs.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/the-state-capital-and-representation/

John Holloway: Of Despair and Hope

To the misfits of the world, to all of us who do not conform to the closing of humanity: Now, more than ever, the world looks two ways at once. One face looks towards a dark, depressing world. A world of closing doors. A closing of lives, of possibilities, of hopes. These are times of austerity. You must learn to live with reality. You must obey if you want to survive, give up your dreams. Do not expect to live by doing what you like. You will be lucky to find a job at all. Perhaps you can study, but only if your parents have money. And, even then, do not think that you can study something critical. Criticism has fled from the universities and so much the better. What is the point of criticising when we all know that the world is set in its course? There is no alternative, just the reality of the rule of money, so forget your dreams. Obey, work hard in whatever scrap of employment you can find, or else look forward to a life of hunting through garbage cans, because there will be no welfare state to protect you. Look, look at Greece and be warned! That is the impoverishment you can expect, that is what will happen to you if you do not submit, that is the punishment meted out in this school of life to naughty children, to those who hope too much, to those who want too much. This lesson of despair was learnt very well, too well, by Dimitris Christoulas, who shot himself in Sintagma Square in the centre of Athens just a few weeks ago. A 77-year old ex-pharmacist whose pension was wiped out by the austerity measures imposed by the governments of Europe, he said “I can find no other solution than to put an end to my life before I start sifting through garbage cans for my food.” This is the meaning of austerity. This is what the governments of Europe and the world are trying to impose on the people - all the governments, all of them alike the servants of money, whether they speak from apparent positions of power, like the German government or whether they are the simple functionaries of the international bank system, like Papademos or Monti. The austerity measures do not just impose poverty, they cut the wings of hope. That is the direction the world is heading in, but is that all there is? Is there no way we can turn the world around? Does the world not have another face, one that looks in a different direction? The death of Dimitris Christoulas faces in two directions: it is a despair, but also a refusal to accept despair. In his suicide note he writes “I believe that young people with no future will one day take up arms and hang this country’s traitors upside down in Syntagma Square just as the Italians hanged Mussolini in 1945.” Hope glows in the very depths of despair. The basis of that hope is a simple No. No, we will not accept. No, we will not accept what you are trying to do to us. No, we will not accept your austerity. No we will not accept the discipline of money, no we will not accept the killing of hope. No, we will not accept the obscene inequalities of this world we live in, no we will not accept a society that is hurtling us towards our own destruction. And no, we will not suggest alternative policies. We do not want to solve your problems because the only solution to the problems of capital is our defeat, the future of capitalism is the death of humanity. Even if capital solves this crisis, the next one will not be far away, even more destructive. We will not obey you, politicians-bankers, because you are the dead past, we are the possible future. The only possible future. That is our hope: we are the only possible future. But our possible future is no more than a possibility. Its realisation depends on our being able to turn the world around. How do we turn the world around? Dimitris Christoulas speaks of young people taking up arms and hanging the politicians from the lampposts. That idea grows more attractive by the day, and the politicians of the world know that it is not just fantasy: that is why in Greece they are afraid to go out in the streets, that is why in all the world they are giving more and more arms and powers to the police. Yet, however attractive the idea, it is not by arms that we can turn the world around and create something new. Our rage is of a different kind. Rage and love. Refuse and create. That is the only way we can turn the world around. Love walks hand in hand with rage, creation springs from refusal. We are the fury of a new world pushing through the foul obscenity of the old. Our fury is not the fury of arms – guns are their weapon, not ours. Our fury is the fury of refusal, of stifled creation, of indignation. Who are these people, the politicians and bankers who think they can treat us like objects, who think they can destroy the world and smile as they do it? They are no more than the servants of money, the vile and vicious defenders of a dying system. How dare they try to take our lives away from us, how dare they treat us like that? We refuse. We roar a massive NO that resounds through the world, but our refusal means little unless it is supported by an alternative creation. Our No to the old world will not hold unless we create a new world here and now. The anger of our refusal spills over into new creations. Representative democracy has failed and we build a real democracy in our squares, our meetings, our protests. Capital fails to provide the basics of life and we form networks of mutual support. Money destroys, and we say “No, we shall create a different logic and a different way of coming together”, and so we proclaim “no home without electricity” and organise the reconnection of the electricity supply whenever it is cut off. Debt-collectors come to take away our homes and we organise mass protests to stop them. People go hungry and we create community gardens. The drive for profit massacres human and non-human life and we create new relations, new ways of doing things. Capital pushes us off the streets and out of the squares and we occupy. All of this is inadequate, all is experimental, but that is the way to go, that is the other face of the present world, that is the new world of mutual recognition struggling to be born. Perhaps we cannot yet change the whole world to be as we want it, but we can create and we are creating it here and here and here and here and now, we are creating cracks in the system and these cracks will grow and spread and multiply and flow together. We will not accept the closing of the night on humanity. We can and will stop it, we shall turn the world around.


Written by John Holloway for May 1st 2012 General Strike pamphlets

# 77 years old man commit suicide at #Syntagma sq. Athens Greece. Last Words: "I don't want to leave debt to my children"!

Τhat's Enough!

Α 77-y.o shot himself in the head

in full view of passersby

at Syntagma square, 

across Parliament in Athens Greece. 

#Greece has seen suicide rates rise 

by 40% in past 2 yrs, 

apprx. 2000 people took their own lives.

The 77 years old man walked 

down the steps that lead to the

square where during 

all summer of 2011

millions of people demonstrated 

and revolted against Ιnequality, 

Totalitarianism and Exploitation 

and shot his head!

His death was instantaneous 

Police and ambulance 

came at the spot. 

The people around the square 

applauded the dead body, 

crying and shouting 

"this where you get with 

all these measures". 

During that moments 
a direct witness of the event 
said that 
he heared the old man shouting:

"I don't want 

to leave debt to my children"!

Policemen searched 

his pockets to identify him 

and they collected the gun 

that he used to end his life.

They found also a message in his pockets that was written: 

"The Tsolakoglou government* has annihilated all traces for my survival, which was based on a very dignified pension that I alone paid for 35 years with no help from the state. And since my advanced age does not allow me a way of dynamically reacting (although if a fellow Greek were to grab a Kalashnikov, I would be right behind him), I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don’t find myself fishing through garbage cans for my sustenance. I believe that young people with no future, will one day take up arms and hang the traitors of this country at Syntagma square, just like the Italians did to Mussolini in 1945"  

People gather at the square...

 

*Georgios Tsolakoglou was the first collaborationist prime minister during Germany's occupation of Greece during the Second World War.

The reference has been widely interpreted as a comparison between the wartime collaborationist government and the current government of Lucas Papademos.

The suicide occured shortly before 9am, as people went about their business on the square. Christoulas, 77, shot himself while standing next to a tree on one of the grassy areas on the square.  He died from a single shot to the head, reports say.

He was a retired pharmacist, with a wife and a daughter. He sold his pharmacy in 1994.