CHANGES IN WILLFUL DISOBEDIENCE
As you can see, I have changed the formatting
of Willful Disobedience. This is in
part due to problems with my computer that are making it increasingly difficult
to do more complex formatting tricks, but it also reflects a few changes in
what I am doing with WD. I have
always included a fair amount of theoretical and analytical content since this
is something sorely lacking in the English language anarchist press
(particularly that of the US), but I have also included a substantial amount of
news shorts. Since most of these items appear in other anarchist periodicals
that have far wider circulation, I have decided to limit these items. I will
include articles analyzing actions - for example, analyses of anti-war activity
- and revolts, and I will include news shorts in a "news of revolt"
section of the sort that are likely not to appear in that many places,
particularly news of actions that do not fit within the usual
"political" frameworks, but rather reflect people's attempts to
attack the alienation and oppression they experience in their daily lives.
Please send more stories of this sort to me.
A FEW WORDS:
On Being Who We Say We Are
I call myself an anarchist not because the word sounds good,
nor because it will make me appear more radical, nor even merely because I
desire the disappearance of the state (even Lenin claimed that he ultimately
desired this much... when the time was ripe). I call myself an anarchist
because I have chosen to go about my struggle against the world of domination
in a particular way. In these times when the degradation of language drains
words of their content, undermining the capacity for meaningful dialogue, it is
particularly important for anarchists to maintain the significance of this
term.
It has been rightly said that "anarchism is not a
concept that can be locked up in a word like a gravestone". But this is
not because it can mean anything, but rather because, as the same writer said,
"it is a way of conceiving life, and life... is not something definitive:
it is a stake we must play day after day." The anarchist is one who
chooses to play this stake on her own terms to the extent that this is
possible. In particular, the anarchist is one who chooses to carry on his struggle on her own terms, without any
room for compromise or negotiation with the ruling institutions. This refusal
does not stem from a desire for purity, as some have tried to claim, but from
the recognition that any compromise on the field of struggle would be a further
relinquishment of the lives that have already been stolen from us, the lives we
are struggling to take back.
Perhaps the most basic anarchist principle, the one from
which all the others spring, is the recognition that freedom can only be
realized in freedom, that
self-determination - that is to say, the creation of lives that are truly our own - can only be won through a
struggle that is truly our own. This
is what is meant when we say that our ends must exist in the means we use to
achieve them.
This principle is not merely, a fine, ethical stance. Above
all, it is a hard lesson that has been brought home over and over again in
every revolutionary experience. Compromise with the ruling institutions, with
the so-called oppositional institutions that claim to represent the people in
struggle or with any form of hierarchy or representation is always the death of
the struggle against all domination. Such compromises are the points where
either the old power begins to establish itself (as in France in 1968) or the
new power begins to take hold (as in Russia after the October 1917 revolution).
So this principle, in fact, has a solid foundation.
But this principle is also the primary distinction between
an anarchist revolutionary
perspective and any other revolutionary perspective. All forms of communism
call for the eventual withering away of the state. But an anarchist perspective
recognizes that the state and every other institution must be rejected from the
start, because institutions usurp the capacity of people for self-organization.
And it is here that the anarchist wager - the staking of one's life spoken of
above - comes into play. Having not merely called for the eventual end of the
state, the institutions of domination and all hierarchy and representation, but
having also rejected them here and now as means for carrying out one's
revolutionary struggle, one has no choice but to actually pursue a methodology
that relies only on oneself and one's trusted comrades, a methodology based in
autonomy and self-organization, direct action in its true sense - i.e., acting
directly to achieve one's aims for oneself - and total conflict with the ruling
order.
Quite clearly there is no place in such a choice for voting,
for petitioning the state, for litigation, for promoting legislation of any
sort or for fooling oneself that any means by which one legally gains one's
survival in any way reflects an anarchist or revolutionary perspective. But to
fully comprehend what it means to carry out one's struggle in a self-organized
manner, it is necessary to recognize the full extent of the institutions of
domination. If one refuses to vote because one rejects the idea of being
represented, then logically one would also refuse to talk to New York Times
journalists or television reporters for precisely the same reason. The image
they paint of the anarchist is also a representation, and the argument that we
should talk to them in order to put out a more accurate representation follows
the same logic as that which calls us to vote in order to get better
representation in the halls of government. The anarchists in Greece who smash
television cameras and attack journalists have a much better idea of how to
deal with the misrepresentations of the media.
The economic blackmail of capitalist society will force us
to make some compromises in terms of how we get the things we need to live
(even robbing a bank is a compromise, since, in fact, we'd rather live without
money and banks or the system that creates them). There is not currently a
strong enough movement of social subversion to counteract this, one in which
the taking and sharing of goods is a widespread, festive practice. But in terms
of our various social and personal struggles against this society, no such
coercion exists, and one can choose to struggle as an anarchist - refusing to
turn to any of the institutions of domination to accomplish the tasks we
consider necessary to accomplish the social transformation we desire. Such a
refusal means rejecting all the various ideologies and practices of the
capitalist cult of efficiency for its own sake - the quantitative illusions
that judges a movement in terms of numbers of participants, the pragmatic
acceptance of "whatever works", the fetish of organization which
creates invisible hierarchies with its theoretical and practical programs to
which people are to adhere. Thus, from an anarchist perspective, the phrase
"by any means necessary" becomes counterrevolutionary. It is the
opening of the door to the Reign of Terror or the slaughter at Kronstadt.
So if it is to mean anything when we call ourselves
anarchists, we need to keep this primary principle in mind: our struggle
against this world must be completely our own. Of course, this is no simple
task. It requires the use of practical imagination in order to figure out how
to carry out the various tasks that we place before ourselves. It requires a
willingness to make a constant critical assessment of what we are doing,
refusing to make excuses. It requires a willingness to recognize our current limits
while, of course, perpetually seeking to expand our possibilities.
To a great extent, the term "anarchist" has been drained of meaning due to its increasing popularity as a self-description since the fall of the traditional left and particularly since the demonstrations in Seattle at the end of 1999. But this loss of meaning has also been advanced by anarchists who have been in the movement for years, who choose to embrace an evangelistic project, placing numbers and visibility in the spectacle above the concrete attempt to live out their revolt and to create their struggle as their own. This leads to an embrace of that capitalistic sort of pragmatism in which the ultimate aims have been lost in the striving for immediate effect - the methodology of the advertiser. To counter this, it is necessary to clarify once again what the anarchist project actually is. It is not an attempt to win followers to a particular belief system. It is not an attempt to make this society a little more bearable. Rather it is an attempt to create a world in which every individual is free to pursue the creation of his life on her own terms in free association with others of her choosing, and thus also to destroy every institution of domination and exploitation, every hierarchy including the invisible one's that grow out of evangelistic and programmatic schemes. With this in mind, we can carry out our struggle by those means that reflect the world we desire and, thus, make our lives fuller, more passionate and more joyful here and now.
WHERE IS THE FESTIVAL?
Regular life, full of precautions and good sense, occupied
by work every day, requires a break. But these breaks cannot be reduced to
single moments that serve individuals as a time to rest from the weariness of
work during summer vacations or on weekends.
The maintenance of order also requires times in which
individuals are allowed to break loose, to do what is usually prohibited to
them, to vent their tensions collectively, provided that it is in a
circumscribed ritual. The audacities that have been permitted in every epoch in
festivals - like the Carnival with its costumes and its insolence - bear
witness to this social necessity and perpetuate it. Still today, though the
impoverished celebrations scarcely separated from the monotony of daily life,
one distinguishes in them some minimal vestige of past outbursts.
In Ivrea, Italy, the annual carnival is celebrated with the
battle of the oranges that lasts three days and involves the participation of
thousands of people. Sometimes, by the end of the first day, there are hundreds
of wounded. It is easy to understand how a feast of this sort, transgressing
the norms that regulate daily existence with violence, might appear like a
different world to those who take part in it, a time of intense emotion and the
transformation of one's being.
But the manifestation of this exuberance, of this relative
feeling of freedom, is allowed only on the condition that it is limited and
circumscribed in time and space. In short, the festival becomes the parody of
revolt - like the carnival in Ivrea that was instituted in the medieval era
following a revolt, in order to give the people a way to give vent to their
powerlessness,, but without putting Power in danger.
But at bottom,
how many of us do not live on the memory of one festival and in the hope of
another?
WHERE TO NOW?
Some Thoughts on the Uprising in Argentina
During the
course of an uprising, there comes a time when decisions far beyond those of
tactics, logistics and the meeting of daily needs must be made. A point is
reached in the struggle where the choice between pursuing one of the various
known paths or choosing to explore the unknown can no longer he ignored.
Unfortunately, it seems that in most cases, this decision, which may he the
most important decision of any revolutionary struggle, is left to chance, to
the random twists of circumstance.
I have been
trying as well as one can from the distance of several thousand miles to keep
informed about the uprising that exploded in Argentina last December. Though
the information has been sparse even in anarchist sources, it is clear that
this is no flash in the pan. The distrust in the rulers has moved well beyond
the realm of mere outrage into the actual practice of self-organization and direct
action on a large scale. The neighborhood assemblies have managed to maintain a
healthy contempt for all politicians and labor union leaders, allowing them to
remain an organ of insurgent struggle. The signs of struggle in neighboring
countries - Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil - could open farther
possibilities.
But over the
past couple of months, the information l have read from Argentina indicates
that the struggle there has reached an important crossroads. Assemblies have
been carrying out occupations of spaces of various sorts in order to develop
activities and projects. When police come to the occupied spaces, demanding to
speak to someone in charge, people tell them, "We are all in charge".
At the same time workers have occupied _factories and have had several meetings
to discuss where they want to take this struggle. These meetings have not only
included the factory workers, but also people from the neighborhood assemblies
and unemployed groups. These occupations of spaces by neighborhood assemblies
and of factories by workers mean that more and more of the tools through which
the ruling order operated have been appropriated by the insurgents. The
question now becomes: what will people do with these tools?
A true
revolution cannot simply be a change in the way current social relationships
are managed. Even self-management of the current system of social relationships
remains exploitative and dominating. The whole of society simply comes to
replace the individual bosses and rulers as the exploiter and dominator. This
is why the question of what to do with these tools is so central. The spaces
that have been taken over by the neighborhood assemblies are already seen as
places in which the people involved in these assemblies can carry out the projects
and activities that they consider desirable. They therefore potentially point
to an exploration into new and unknown possibilities for relating and
interacting.
Factories, on
the other hand, were developed for the explicit purpose of milking the maximum
amount of labor at a minimum cost from the workers - in other words,
exploitation is built into them. It is not clear to what extent the Argentine
workers involved in the occupations are questioning their role as workers - the
role assigned to them by capital. A report about the ceramists of Zanon
indicates that the occupying workers there continue to work as they did before,
massproducing ceramics, and this is how they have maintained their livelihood.
In other words, they have not yet questioned their role as workers in a
practical manner and sought to find new ways to create their lives that are not
based on alienated labor. I state this not as a judgment, but to clam the
fundamental choice about which I have been speaking. The Zanon case is of particular
interest because the workers there have been demanding "nationalization
under workers' control" - a demand that would mean continued involvement
in the market economy and commodity production rather than a dismantling of the
work machine. Not surprisingly, according to the report, union leaders and
human rights organization - con artists from the left wing of the old order -
have been involved in this particular struggle.
But the
workers of Zanon do not represent all workers, and what they have done up to
now could change if the general revolt takes a direction that moves beyond mere
self-management of exploitation. From here, I cannot know the extent of
experimentation and exploration of new ways of relating that are going on. I do
not know whether there are those who are striving to explore ways of creating
what they need and desire outside of the context of work as an activity
separated from life, those who desire to dismantle the factories in order to
open more space and free up more tools for the exploration of other ways of
living. Generally during insurrections, imaginations go wild in the most
positive ways. But there are also always the spokespeople for "realism
", and the people of Argentina have gone through very hard times. The
people of Zanon cannot be blamed if the put their survival before utopian
exploration: a hungry belly makes it hard to dream. But this is precisely how
the old world creeps back in, undermining the libratory experiences of
insurrection.
Precisely
where the uprising in Argentina will go now is hard to guess. Most likely, some
adaptation to the present reality will occur. This does not in any way reflect
upon a lack of revolutionary imagination or tenacity on the part of the
insurgent people in Argentina. The lack of tolerance for politics or leadership
in the neighborhood assemblies and their occupation of spaces for their own
purposes indicate that there is some confused vision of a truly total
transformation. But the reality of a global civilization based on domination
and exploitation of people and the earth still very much exists, and it will
not be willing to lose any of the resources in Argentina, including those that
are human. This is why those of us who would desire to see the Argentine
insurgents take that step into the unknown where work no longer exists as a
sphere separated from life, where all the prisons through which this society
imposes social control - including the factories - have been dismantled, where
people create their lives together on the basis of their needs and desires with
no predetermined programs which they must follow, cannot simply sit back in
open-mouthed awe of these courageous insurgents. We must examine their struggle
critically, not in order to judge them or tell then: what to do, but in order
to learn from it and use those lessons in developing our own struggle here
where we live. Until there are insurgent struggles, destroying the old world
and beginning to explore new ways of existing and creating our lives,
throughout the world, and particularly in the "West"- the so-called
"first world "- -specific struggles will always be recuperated or
destroyed, with maybe a few insurgents left to struggle on their own. That is
why the necessary form of solidarity with the insurgents in Argentina and in
the rest of the world is that of attack against the ruling civilization and all
of its institutions with the a in: of creating an insurrectional struggle here
as well.
A BIT OF SILENCE...
(from
Il Viaggio, number 3, January 2002,
slightly revised)
A
bit of silence, we implore you.
Let's allow our steps as eternal travelers that have landed by choice or
through necessity on the streets of the city to speak.
Let's listen to them:
they are steps of galley slaves. So much is lacking if we want them to become
the steps of people who are freeing themselves, and what is lacking above all
is the capacity to truly speak with each other, to dialogue. No, we are not
referring to the empty and impotent chattering in which we all too often lose
ourselves. It has nothing to do, then with the continuous bawl of the
television. Dialogue is a concrete thing: it is staking oneself once and for
all, it is speaking about the life that we live because we are disposed to
change it. We have as much need of this as of the air that we breathe.
But
democracy takes it away from
us, this capacity to dialogue, rendering us noisily deaf and dumb.
From one side
it affirms freedom of speech, from the other it maintains and deepens social
division, that is to say, exploitation and authority. In unfortunate words: the
governments and masters are deciding everyone's future; the exploited are free
to say as much as they want, as long as, in reality, they can decide nothing.
And when speech is separated from its concrete power to change the world, the
words themselves are emptied, they lose force and meaning. Deluding ourselves
that we are participating in decisions from which we are actually excluded, we
lose the capacity to formulate discussions that are not empty and powerless. It
is as if we kept a leg immobilized for years and years until it atrophied;
afterwards, someone could tell us, "now, walk!" We would no longer
walk, we would have lost the capacity and the whole idea of walking. How much
space still exists within us for imagining words that change life, then? What
is left of our capacity to say and understand them? We don't know with
certainty.
The only certainty possible is that if dialogue must be concrete to exist, the place where it is practiced and the way in which it is practiced must be
equally concrete.
If dialogue
is staking oneself, then we can stake ourselves only with those who, like us,
have very little to lose from a change, those who live the same social
condition, exploitation. Any other place of
dialogue is illusory. Claiming to dialogue with the masters, for example, makes
no sense, because they have an entire world to lose.
If we want
this staking of oneself to be a collective thing and at the same time
profoundly individual, the only way we
have for dialoguing is the direct and horizontal way, without delegation. It is
not possible to dialogue, then, with the structures that are organized in a
vertical manner in which, due to leaders, sub-leaders and spokespeople, some
decide for others. Not even with those parties and unions that talk of being on
the side of the exploited, let us be clear.
Only on these
simple conditions, that have nothing to do with democracy, is it possible to
dialogue. Only on these conditions will we find the words for doing so.
--Insurrection
begins with the desire of individuals to break out of constrained and
controlled circumstances, the desire to reappropriate the capacity to create
one's own life as one sees fit. This requires that they overcome the separation
between them and their conditions of existence. Where the few, the privileged,
control the conditions of existence, it is not possible for most individuals to
truly determine their existence on their terms. Individuality can only flourish
where equality of access to the conditions of existence is the social reality. This equality of access is
communism; what individuals do with that access is -up to them and
those around them.
THE
PRICE OF AN ENTIRE WORLD
by
Massimo Passamani
Every day, this society of hierarchy and money produces violence
and, at the same time, a fixed system of moral anesthesia with which to support
it. The capacity to perceive it has become an endeavor as well -as
necessary condition of rebellion. Daily relations are a huge, complex game of
disguising the brutality.
The first rule is to fragment the activities of individuals
in such a way that it is impossible to perceive them in their unity. What would
the worker think if he had the totality of causes and effects of his small
repetitive gestures before his eyes all at once? The machines that she operates
produce exploitation, poverty, pain, death. But only with an effort can one
link the starving children in Africa that one saw on television with the raw
materials that one uses and the products that one manufactures. Remaining
focused on tiny push-buttons is an anesthetizing of awareness. The little
bureaucrat who fills out forms for eight hours a day does not see the immigrant
that he will deport when he is at home, because her name on that form is not
there. He doesn't see who will end up in prison because she didn't agree with
stamped papers. He has never locked the prison door on anyone, not him.
Passive contemplation toward a work activity that one goes
through in complete unawareness is the same as that which chains one to the
screen. The television viewer comes directly out of the factory or the office.
She complains about her job just as he complains about the politician on TV.
But if, while the latter spoke, one could see the people crushed by laws,
killed by asbestos, bombed, mangled by barbed wire and tortured in any police
station, if one could collect the blood, the suffering behind the politician's
trashy smile, what would happen?
The only violence that is perceived is that which is
reported. The mafia kills for money. The citizen is indignant, and the more
indignant she is, the more innocent she feels when she uses money (the great
mafia). The terrorist puts bombs on trains. The citizen is indignant, and the
more indignant he is the more he feels at home when he goes to vote (for the
great terrorists). So many people, who earn money every day, take it to the
bank and make their purchase at the supermarket, have never held a weapon, or
made a threat, or wounded, or killed. They work in insurance, at the post
office, at the custom-house or wherever; they are peaceful and love neither
blood nor bullying. Clever people. They have never wanted to see violence,
therefore they have never seen it.
The economy, in its abstractness, appears to move by itself.
This is why money seems harmless. One doesn't see the violence among banknotes,
thus it is not there. But one tries to reach out and grasp a product without
giving its corresponding exchange value, its socially established value, its
general equivalent, in short, money, in return. Suddenly, here is society
recovering its calm from its pieces in the face of violated property. The
capitalist, the judge, the police, the jailer, the journalist, the priest and
the psychologist will come to its defense. They will tell you that the value of
a thing is not your enjoyment, your activity or your need, but rather a
mysterious social measure that grants a product to you only if you also accept
its long train of flatterers, only if you accept the capitalist, the judge,
etc. They will come to teach you the value of work and the habit of seeing in
things the time that must be stolen from you in order to have them - that is
the money - and thus of making things sacred, of serving them, of measuring
your value in relation to them and not the other way around. They will come to
remind you that the respect for property is love for the human person, that if
you think otherwise, you have mental or family problems, that maybe you are
seeking the affection of your parents in theft, however you may have been
helped, raised, educated, connected. They will come to try you, to imprison
you. Or if you defend yourself, they will come to beat you, to shoot you, to
kill you. Whenever anyone disrupts the habitual circulation of money, it is
here, beneath the simulation, that the true face of the market appears:
violence. "Stealing, robbing, how is it possible?" the citizen
thinks, focused on her tiny push-button, on his files or on the television
screen in trout of him. Why illegal activity instead of work? Perhaps because
by stretching out one's hand directly for money, one snatches time - life -
from the organization of the economy. One takes the possibility for doing as
one pleases, for dreaming, for discussing, for loving, for creating one's projects
from the dead time of work. Less time for work, more time for destroying it.
Money is time. One certainly does not escape exploitation and the commodity
system by attacking property (to think this is once again to focus on one's own
pointing finger, thus, yet another ethical anesthetic). What one obtains,
having the strength for it, is a few additional possibilities. Things, no
longer measured with the yardstick of money (that is, of the extorted activity
of sacrifice), lend themselves better to experimentation, to the gift, to use,
to destruction. Work no longer appears only as the wage (the first of its
chains), but as social organization, as an ensemble of relationships. Escaping
the wage system - in the narrow sense - provides one with an additional tool
(provided that one does not allow oneself to be enslaved by the money, by the role of robber, by specialization) in
the struggle against the economy. But this struggle is either widespread or it
is nothing. Only when looting becomes an extensive practice, when the gift arms
itself against exchange value, when relationships are no longer mediated by
commodities and individuals give their
own value to things, only then does the destruction of the market and of
money - that is all one with the demolition of the state and of every hierarchy
- become a real possibility.
But when the authorities catch a glimpse of all these
aspirations behind a robbery, they raise the price. If those who commit the
robbery are anarchist individuals, the price goes up to the risk of shooting or
being killed, up to the risk of losing the time one wanted to snatch from work
in prison, up to all the additional time the magistrates have planned for them
with the additional charge of "armed band". The punishment increases.
There is a theorem prepared for any comrade who individually decides to solve
his money problem by committing a robbery, that would lock him up, even before
he is put in jail, in a secret structure with leaders, treasurers and
bookkeepers. Thus, the state presents and increasingly spiced-up account and
tries to create an odious collective responsibility in order to turn us into
the controllers of each other. Once again, illegal violence is reported to
cover up the daily, legal violence. Where an anarchist is involved, the train
of the flatterers of money is even longer. The wares are even more costly,
because what is in question is the very existence of capitalists, judges,
police, jailers, journalists, priests, psychologists, bureaucrats, workers and
robbers.
The surplus of repression is defending a whole world of
prices. No price should seem too high.
WHEN PEACE IS WAR
We are all aware that the United
States is gearing up for an attack on Iraq. The formalities are still being
worked out, but at this point, US military action seems almost certain. But
this war will not be without resistance. There have already been numerous
protests against the war, and the attack on the recruiting station in San Jose
(see "Chronicles of Revolt" in this issue) certainly seems to be a
response to the call for war as well. When the actual fighting begins, more
resistance can be expected. But resistance to this war cannot simply rely on
methods and concepts from the past. An "anti-war" movement that is
not also an attempt to completely overturn the ruling order no longer makes any
sense. Therefore it is necessary for anarchists to make a serious analysis of
the situation that is arising.
Anarchists have already put out a number of calls
for non-compliance and insubordination toward the war effort, and these are
certainly worthy endeavors. But to understand what this would mean requires
careful examination of the situation. A 'zine of "proletarian
grumbling" out of London called The Whinger points out a few things we
should consider in developing our resistance:
Even if there was a general
strike in the west it would probably be too late to stop an attack. They no
longer need the labour of the bulk of us in the "developed" world
directly in their war effort. In the west they no longer need mass conscript
armies or mass forced militarization of labour in specific industrial war
production to directly sustain the war effort. Most of the weapons are now
produced beforehand under capitalist "peacetime" in dispersed
commercial arms production which is not labour intensive. Much of the
"fighting" by US or british or European forces can be done by
privileged protected elite professional technicians and officer-bureaucrats,
leaving some shooting and mopping up and patrolling on the ground for regular
soldiers. This sort of changes the role of regular soldiers from an attacking
and war-fighting role to an occupying and heavy policing role.
There are a number of significant
points that can be drawn from these observations. While a number of opponents
of the war are seeking to play on the 1ossibility of another Vietnam as a way
of inspiring wider opposition, this is, in fart, very unlikely. For all
practical intents and purposes, the US has been carrying on a war against Iraq
since 1991, with no use of ground troops since the end of Operation Desert
Storm and only the occasional bombardment, relying instead on the UN-sanctioned
embargo to impoverish and kill Iraqis. Unlike the war in Vietnam, this
operation has not had any visible effects on the daily lives of the American
populace. The current effort to heat up this war is simply intended to get rid
of a former ally who has become a liability in order to increase US control in
the region. On this level, it has far more in common with the "humanitarian
bombing" of Yugoslavia than with the Vietnam war. And we can assume that
this war will be fought in a similar fashion: intensive aerial bombing with
high tech weapons causing a fair amount of "collateral damage"
consisting of Iraqi civilian dead and wounded, but few if any American
casualties, followed by an occupation by an armed, military peace-keeping"
force. In fact, the Bush administration has been talking of setting up an
interim American-run military government ruled by a US military officer, similar
to that which was set up in Japan following World War IL The point is that this
specific war is likely to be very short. It is the military role of
"peace-keeping" that will continue.
In fact this war (like every war)
is the product of capital's peace-time policies on every level. Contrary to
Orwell's thinking, "war is peace" is not a totalitarian "big
lie". It is, in fact, an accurate description of the current functioning
of the ruling order, though it may be more precise to say, "Peace is
war". This is what we need to keep in mind as we seek to build resistance
to this war. My grumbling proletarian friend goes on to say: '...the slogan
'sabotage the war economy' is actually strictly speaking mistaken. The problem
is that the majority of us are not directly in a war economy at the moment,
most of us are still very much in a 'peace-time' economy and that is what we
need to sabotage and socially subvert." For the ruling order, peace-time
is simply the time to calmly prepare for the wars to come. With the current
military technologies and methods, most of us in the west will rarely
experience any significant change in our daily routine due to a war such as the
one proposed. We will continue to experience capital's "peace', that fine
civilized peace that so bores, yet pacifies, us. Therefore, any effective
resistance to this war must also be a subversive attack against the peace of
the ruling order. So it is not so much in terms of any immediate effect on the
current war effort as on the level of the necessity to destroy current social
order in order to make wars of this sort impossible that the practice of
non-compliance and insubordination becomes significant.
But "peace is war" not
only because the ruling class uses peace-time to prepare for future wars, but
more significantly because their 'peace" is itself carried on as a war.
Who are the peacekeepers in Bosnia, in Kosovo, in Afghanistan? They are armed
military personnel. And even on the streets of the cities here in the west,
peace is maintained by armed people in uniform, often with military training.
The police also constitute an arm of the state, and those who live in poor
neighborhoods often know what it is like to be occupied and under the threat of
death or capture if they make the wrong move. Consider as well the obvious
militarization of the police involved in crowd control during demonstrations
and protests. Peacekeeping is really nothing other than warmaking. Thus, it
can be said that the entire world lives in a state of permanent war, the
unending violence through which our rulers maintain their power.
This is why no call for peace
makes sense any more. It would simply be a call to maintain the order that
sustains war. There can be no negotiation, no coming to terms with this
civilized world. It requires war to suppress the desperation of those it has
excluded that is breaking through its doors as everything falls apart. All we
can oppose to the bombs over Iraq, if we want our opposition to be more than
symbolic, a mere appeasing of our consciences, is class attack. We must
liberate the smoldering hatred and hurt it against those who have stolen our
lives and the lives of all the exploited of the earth. Identifying the common
enemy - the owners, the rulers, the technological and productive network, the
totality of a civilization based on domination and exploitation - is the
primary form of solidarity toward the bombed and the refugees. Attacking this
enemy is the only real tool we have for transforming the wars imposed by the
social order - in which we end up killing each other in our real enemy's
interests - into a fight for liberation from exploitation and domination, from
every form of rule.
A FAMILY AFFAIR
In the struggle to take back our lives, it is necessary to
call every institution into question, even those that reach into the most
intimate aspects of our lives. In fact, it is particularly important to
challenge these institutions, because their closeness to us, their intimacy,
can make them appear not to be institutions at all, but rather the most natural
of relationships. And then they can work their insidious ploys and make
domination itself appear natural.
Family relationships are taken for granted, even by most
anarchists. It is precisely the intimacy of these relationships that makes them
appear so natural. And yet the family as we know it - the nuclear family, that
ideal unit for commodity consumption - is just a little more than a half a
century old, and is already in a state of disintegration. And earlier forms of
family relationships seem to reflect the requirements of economic necessity or
social cohesion rather than any natural inclination.
The institution of the family goes hand in hand with the
institution of marriage. If in non-state societies marriage has tended to be a
very loose bond which was aimed primarily at maintaining certain sorts of
kinship relationships, with the rise of the state and of property, it became a
much tighter relationship, in fact a relationship of ownership.
More specifically, marriage became that institution in which
the father, recognized as the owner of his family, gave his daughter to another
man who then, as her husband, became her new owner. Thus, the family is the
seat of the domination of women that spreads from there to all of society.
Within the family, though, there is a further hierarchy. The
central purpose of the family is the reproduction of society, and this requires
the reproduction of human beings. Thus, the wife is expected to bear children,
and the children, though still ultimately owned by the man, are under the
direct authority of their mother. This is why many of us who grow up in
families in which the so-called "traditional" gender roles were
accepted, in fact, experienced our mothers as the first authority to dominate
us. Dad was a distant figure, working his 60 to 70 hours a week (despite the
supposed labor victory of the 40-hour work week) to provide his family with all
the things that this society claims are necessary for the good life. Mom
scolded us, spanked us, set our limits, strove to define our lives - like the
manager at the workplace, who is the daily face of the boss, while the owner
remains mostly invisible.
So the real social purpose of the family is the reproduction
of human beings. This does not merely mean giving birth to children, but also
transforming this human raw material into a being useful to society - a loyal
subject, a good citizen, an industrious worker, an avid consumer. So from the
moment of birth, it is necessary that mother and father begin to train the child.
It is on this level that we can understand the immediate exclamation:
"It's a boy!" "It's a girl!" Gender is the one social role
that can be assessed from biology at birth, and so it is the first to be
imposed through a variety of symbols - colors of nursery walls and blankets,
clothing styles, toys offered for play, the kinds of games encouraged, and so
on.
But this happens in conjunction with an emphasis on
childishness as well. Rather than encouraging independence, self-reliance and
the capacity to make their own decisions and act on them, children are
encouraged to act naive, inept, lacking the capacity to reason and act
sensibly. This is all considered "cute" and "cuteness" is
supposed to be the primary trait of children. Although most children, in fact,
use "cuteness" quite cleverly as a way to get around the demands of
adults, the social reinforcement of this trait, nonetheless, supports and
extends helplessness and dependence long enough for social conditioning to take
hold, for servility to become a habit. At this point, "cuteness"
begins to be discouraged and mocked as childishness.
Since the normal relationship between a parent and their
child is one of ownership and thus of
domination and submission on the most intimate level, the wiles through which
children survive this end up becoming the habitual methods they use to interact
with the world, a network of defense mechanisms that Wilhelm Reich has referred
to as character armoring. This may, indeed, be the most horrifying aspect of
the family - it's conditioning and our attempts to defend ourselves against it can scar us for life.
In fact, the fears, phobias and defenses instilled in us by
the authority of the family tend to enforce the reproduction of the family
structure. The ways in which parents reinforce and extend the incapacity of
children guarantee that their desires remain beyond their own reach and under
the parents' - that is, authority's - control. This is true even of parents who
"spoil" their children, since such spoiling generally takes the form
of channeling the child's desires toward commodity consumption. Unable to
realize their own desires, children quickly learn to expect lack and to kiss
ass in the hope of gaining a little of what they wa1it. Thus, the economic
ideology of work and commodity consumption is engrained into us by the
relationships forced upon us in childhood. When we reach adolescence and our
sexual urges become more focused, the lack we have been taught to expect causes
us to be easily led into economized conceptions of love and sex. When we get
into a relationship, we will tend to see it as one of ownership, often
reinforced with some symbolic token. Those who don't economize their sexual
urges adequately are stigmatized, particularly if they are girls. We cling to
relationships with a desperation that reflects the very real scarcity of love
and pleasure in this world. And those who have been taught so well that they
are incapable of truly realizing their own desires finally accept that if they
cannot own, or even truly recognize, their
own desires, at least they can define the limits of another's desires, who in
turn defines the limits of theirs. It is safe. It is secure. And it is
miserable. It is the couple, the
precursor of the family.
The desperate fear of the scarcity of love, thus, reproduces
the conditions that maintain this scarcity. The attempt to explore and
experiment with ways of loving that escape the institutionalization of love and
desire in the couple, in the family, in marriage perpetually runs up against
economized love. This should come as no surprise since certainly this is the
appropriate form for love to take in a society dominated by the economy.
Yet the economic usefulness of the family also exposes its
poverty. In pre-industrial societies (and to some extent in industrial
societies previous to the rise of consumerism), the economic reality of the
family resided largely in the usefulness of each family member in carrying out
essential tasks for the survival of the family. Thus, the unity of the family
served a purpose relating to basic needs and tended to be extended beyond the
nuclear family unit. But in the West, with the rise of consumerism after World
War II, the economic role of the family changed. Its purpose was now to
reproduce consumers representing various target markets. Thus, the family
became the factory for producing housewives, teenagers, school kids, all beings
whose capacities to realize their desire has been destroyed so that it can be
channeled into commodity consumption. The family remains necessary as the means
for reproducing these roles within individual human beings, but since the
family itself is no longer the defining limit of impoverished desire - that
role now played by the commodity - there is no real basis left for family
cohesion. Thus, we see the current horror of the breakdown of the family
without its destruction. And few people are able to conceive of a full life
involving intimacy and love without it.
If
we are to truly take back our lives in their totality, if we are to truly
liberate our desires from the chains of fear and of the commodity, we must
strive to understand all that has chained as, and we must take action to attack
and destroy it all. Thus, in attacking the institutions that enslave us, we
cannot forget to attack that most intimate source of our slavery, the family.
SOME NOTES ON MARXIST ANALYSIS:
For Discussion and Debate Toward the
Development
of a Deeper Anarchist Social Analysis
Often it seems that anarchists lack much in the way of
economic theory, leading to conceptions of revolutionary change that seem to be
largely schemes for a change in the form of social management rather than a
total transformation of existence. Even anarcho-communist visions often seem
more like economic schemes than poetic explorations of possibilities. What
little serious economic theory is developed in anarchist circles seems to take
the form of half-digested Marxism in which it is difficult to see any
specifically anarchist aspects. I do not claim to have a deep knowledge of
Marx. I have read The Communist Manifesto
and the first volume of Capital as
well as a few fragments here and there, but I have read a great deal by
Marxists. There certainly may be many analytical tools that anarchists can
steal from Marxism, but we need to do so critically. This article is intended
to open up discussion in this area and deals with one particular problem I have
with much Marxist analysis. There are others as well.
Marxist analysis is aimed at a revolutionary understanding
of the social relationships of capitalism - as such, it is an attempt to
understand the activities and relationships of
people. Marx developed his theory and methodology to provide the movement
toward communism with a materialistic/scientific basis, in opposition to the
quasi-mystical basis behind so many earlier communist ideas.
Unfortunately, the mechanistic basis of modem science,
particularly in its 19th century manifestation, all too readily
eradicates what is living from any situation under analysis in order to make it
fit into the equations developed. Thus, in a great deal of Marxist theory, the
fact that it is relationships between
people that are being analyzed seems to be forgotten. Instead, the
activities of productive forces, value, surplus labor, etc. end up being
analyzed with the reality of human interaction disappearing beneath the
economic concepts. But like gravity, evolution, entropy, inertia, etc., these
concepts are not material realities, but mental constructs that can be useful
tools for developing an understanding of relationships. In other words, they
are not entities that can act for themselves.
Since "laws" of physics general refer to
relationships between entities that, as far as we can tell, have no volition,
these "laws" can be applied - to the extent to which they are useful
- without taking individuality into account. But in dealing with social
relationships – the activities and relationships between individuals with
dreams, desires, passions and wills - the volitional aspect cannot be ignored
without losing one of the most significant aspects of our situation, one of the
most important tools for understanding social reality.
Taking the volitional aspect of social relationships into
account removes some assumptions that often appear in Marxist analyses. First
of all, one can no longer speak of situations that are objectively
revolutionary or objectively non-revolutionary situations. Rather one can only
speak in terms of situations in which uprisings are more likely to occur and
those in which they are less likely to occur, situations in which uprisings are
more likely to flower into revolutionary transformation and those in which they
are less likely to do so. But in recognizing the reality of the human will, the
capacity to defy circumstances, not only individually, but also collectively,
is always there. Thus, as well, one of the more disgusting conceptions of
vulgar Marxism - the idea that capitalism, industrialism and the consequent
immiseration of the vast majority of creatures on this planet are a necessary
development in order to realize communism - is exposed for the determinist
ideology that it is.
Once we recognize that all social relationships are the
activities of individuals in association with each other, it becomes clear that
the continuation of the present social order replies on the willingness of
individuals to continue to act and relate in ways that reproduce it. Of course,
in order to destroy this order, the choice to refuse the cur lent existence
must necessarily become collective, ultimately on a global scale. But from what
would this collective 'refusal arise? The economic and productive forces have
developed to the point that they are tearing the planet apart. In fact, any
further development of these forces seem to guarantee the absolute destruction
of the possibility of a free human existence. The old Marxist idea that
development of the forces of production would bring about the objective
necessity for communism no longer makes sense (even many Marxists now reject
this progressivist perspective), unless one means by this, that the havoc
wreaked by the industrial/cybernetic juggernaut will make it necessary to
destroy the civilization of capital and the state in order for us avoid the
parade of ever more devastating catastrohes and the destruction of life. But in
this latter sense, it is not a determined inevitability, but a necessity to
break out of the habits of acceptance and obedience that one is speaking about.
Thus, it is a question of choice, of volition. As one comrade put it, it is not
so much revolutionary consciousness, but revolutionary will that the exploited need to develop. The current social order
continues not because conditions are not ripe for its destruction (they are, in
fact, well past rotting), but because refusal remains isolated and limited,
because most people prefer the security of their misery to the unknown of
insurrection and freedom.
An anarchist economic analysis would have to include, along
with a serious analysis of the relationship of power and wealth, an analysis of
the volitional in the continued reproduction of the economy. It is here that
the role of desire, of aspirations, of utopian dreams in the development of an
insurrectional practice can become an integral part of our analysis, where the
poetry of revolt encounters the theory of revolution.
From WILDCAT SPAIN ENCOUNTERS
DEMOCRACY
Once the proletariat had tasted this passion for social war
these actions were understood clearly and explicitly by all. The burnings, the
stoning of the police,... banks, firemen, etc acquired a lucidity and meaning
for themselves. They were by no means gratuitous acts subject to the tactics of
fascist [...] but on the contrary were perfectly identifiable with the
proletarian expression of social violence against capital.
And those things which were most attacked, even if they
remained intact, were precisely those things which sustain and maintain
capitalist relations. Thus, when cars were attacked and overturned or even
burnt or just plain moved, it was something more than an attack on a lump of
steel with four wheels and a motor. It was an attack on commodity fetishism,
against a fetish which depends on the spectacle and which transforms it into an
instrument of death. When bank and store windows were stoned it wasn't merely a
question of smashing glass crystals but also of smashing the meaning these
places take on as exhibition centers for the circulation of these products.
These expressions of festive destruction came to be the means whereby
communication was reestablished in the streets.
[There was also a reprint of “Dreaming in the Face of
Disaster: Thoughts on Utopia”, this piece is already available online, see:
There was also a section called “Chronicles of Revolt” that
was left out due to formatting problems. - Omnipresence]
