The struggle against borders

Posted on November 3, 2018 by Julius Gavroche

From Crimethinc …

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Miguel Amorós: Technology and the making of fascist totalitarianism

Posted on November 3, 2018 by Julius Gavroche

Without a historical subject, the unity of theory and practice, of reality and reason, is impossible. Events do not awaken consciousness, but at most instill resignation, thus tending to lose their significance as the terrain of practice, but never totally. While it is true that there is no revolutionary class, since all that exists now are masses, it is no less certain that minorities still survive amidst the masses, minorities who have not admitted defeat and who believe in the possibility of a revolutionary practice. The radical struggles that do take place, although few and far between, are the manifest proof that not all is lost. Fascism rules in the geographical center, but not one hundred percent. The normalization of catastrophe is not yet automatic. It is a poor foundation but it is the only practical basis for a revolutionary critique. Every aspect of the lives of the masses is the object of exploitation, and in this respect as well the masses are different from classes. For the masses there is no distinction between work and non-work, which is why struggles cannot be circumscribed by the confines of the workplace. Furthermore, struggles that affect the places where people live have a much greater chance of generating consciousness. Thus, the defense of the urban neighborhoods or the territory, insofar as they demand the self-management of areas, of areas as the space of freedom and desire, is more clarifying. In a fascist environment broad movements and huge dissident organizations, such as characterize the Third World countries, are not possible, but on a small scale solidarity and resistance, information and debate, theory and practice, are perfectly plausible. So that within modern totalitarianism a micro-society of dissidents—a veritable ghetto—is feasible, but in a clandestine state, outside of the din of the mass media. It could find support in the larger struggles, but without allowing itself to be mystified by them. This ghetto has a paradoxically conservative function, since it must rescue the emancipatory and libertarian dream of past struggles from the “uninterrupted noise of all social situations” and preserve it for a time when men and women will “finally be forced to contemplate their real life and mutual relations without illusions” (Karl Marx, “The Communist Manifesto”). It must be invisible to the eyes of power, and therefore outside of the law, unrecuperable, criminal; only thus can it cast light on the cracks in this system that is constantly undergoing self-destruction and help to make these cracks bigger at the right moment. Nothing is objectively certain; history promises nothing. Resistance might become a subject, or it might become merely a picturesque detail in a panorama of desolation, it all depends on how we play our cards.

Miguel Amorós

Technology is not a neutral collection of tools, mere means for mastered goals.  As an integral part of spectacle capitalism, it defines contemporary social relations, erasing pasts and futures, historical subjectivities, moulding new politics of oppression.

The essay shared below continues our exploration of Miguel Amorós analyses of capitalism, along with that of other May 68 writers, Jaime Semprun, Amedeo Bertolo and Eduardo Colombo.

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Miguel Amorós: Culture as the spectacular domestication of desire

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Julius Gavroche

In the current historical phase, and insofar as a project opposed to the dominant system is conceivable, the recovery of culture as a Ciceronian cultura animi does not imply patient dedication to learning, or a craftsman-like cultivation of skill, or a militant restitution of memory. It is above all a practice of cultural sabotage inseparable from a total critique of domination. Culture died long ago and has been replaced by a bureaucratic and industrial substitute. This is why anyone who speaks of culture—or art, or the recovery of historical memory—without reference to the revolutionary transformation of social life, speaks with a corpse in his mouth. All activity in this domain must be inscribed within a unitary project of total subversion; all creation must as a result be fundamentally destructive. One must not take flight from conflict; one must think seriously about it and remain within it.

Miguel Amorós

The crisis of capitalism erodes all forms of human expression, transforming them into the alienated affirmation of desire.  “Culture” is rendered a commodity, a spectacle to be passively consumed in the times and spaces of oppression.

A third essay by Miguel Amorós continues our series on “May 68 writers”.

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Miguel Amorós: The crises of capitalism

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Julius Gavroche

The current crisis, the threshold of a depression in every sense of the word, introduces us to a scenario of profound change and traumatic rupture, where it is impossible to reverse course. The consequences will be of momentous importance. Society, as the kingdom of the irrational and the arbitrary—as the domain of the spectacle—has become too unstable and too unreal. The necessary conflicts will return the world to reality, but it will be a warlike reality. The social struggle, like war, only unfolds in the realm of risk; it breathes an atmosphere of danger. Its development is unforeseeable: it might immerse us again in the worst nightmare or it might just get us out of this mess. Victory is never certain but the crisis is a factor in its favor. It shows us the vulnerable points of the enemy, the points where it is feasible to attack with guarantees of success.

Miguel Amorós

In a series of interconnected, concentric circles, we move through the layers of Miguel Amorós reflections on and interventions in contemporary capitalist society.  The diagnosis of capitalism is accompanied by a search for the conditions of the possibility of anti-capitalist subjectivities, the search for a revolutionary orientation.

What follows is a second essay by Amorós, in our series of “May 68 writers”, that along with Amorós, includes work by Jaime Semprun, Amedeo Bertolo and Eduardo Colombo.

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A call for solidarity: The libertarian cultural centre of Almada

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Julius Gavroche

Anarchist social centres constitute fragile points of passage for anti-capitalist archipelagos of resistance.  Their fragility is born of the (ever increasing) restrictions of private property and State opposition.  Yet they are often the only link to rebellious pasts and radical presents: they are the vehicles of radical thought and practices, the precious islands of different futures struggling against and creating beyond the violence of the present.

The Centro de Cultura Libertária of Cacilhas-Almada, Portugal is the oldest anarchist cultural centre in Iberia; a centre whose space is now threatened by rampant real-estate speculation.  From the CCL, we share their urgent call for solidarity.

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Miguel Amorós: Capitalism as sickness and death

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Julius Gavroche

Society is sick of capitalism and any cure must involve the eradication of the latter. To fight disease it is not enough to dissimulate the symptoms. This has been the shortcoming of environmentalism. The problem can only be resolved by the construction of communities, that is, social groups without commercial relations. These communities must be self-sufficient, that is, they must function outside of the market, allowing for a certain degree of direct satisfaction of real needs and resisting the manipulation of desires. But this is not enough, it is only the starting point, the terrain upon which the new dangerous classes born from the breakdown of capitalist society, the dangerous classes that must abolish the market and the State, have to be based in order to heal themselves. We have to get out in order to fight our way forward. This can be our motto.

Miguel Amorós

Capitalism is a society that produces “goods” through the production of illness, destruction and death.  The scale of the disaster is so great that we “have reached the threshold”, in Amorós words, or perhaps, even passed some kind of point of no return, such that all anti-capitalist politics must be thought through in the shadow of catastrophe.

In a further installment on our series of May 68 writers, we share Miguel Amorós short essay “The sick society”. (libcom.org)

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Miguel Amorós: The need for a revolutionary orientation

Posted on October 28, 2018 by Julius Gavroche

A revolutionary, anti-development movement must have a decolonizing orientation, it will have to be directed towards the locality, it will have to have an anti-statist, de-industrializing and autonomous orientation. That is, it must reinforce, during this phase, a horizontal, integral society in the sense that all activities will form part of a whole (politics, economics, education, culture…). Therefore horizontal, autonomous, integrated, fraternal, balanced, egalitarian, anti-patriarchal and decentralized.

Miguel Amorós

As part of our on going series of the “May 68 writers” Jaime Semprun, Miguel Amorós, Amadeo Bertolo and Eduardo Colombo, we pass onto writings by Miguel Amorós, beginning however with an interview of 2018. (libcom.org)

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Jaime Semprun: The end of critical theory

Posted on October 21, 2018 by Julius Gavroche

 

Revolutionary theory is now the enemy of all revolutionary ideology and knows it.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

 

… since the theoreticians are in reality, as I have pointed out, just as defenseless as ordinary people when it comes to formulating hypotheses concerning the consequences, even the most immediate, of the ongoing disaster, it is hardly surprising that their writings have something ghostly about them, all the more so when they adopt a venerable tone of absolute certainty for the audience. (Ghosts, as everyone knows, like to cover themselves in rusty armor. (23)) Unable to conceive of a future of any kind, they almost totally lack the quality which imparts consistency and bite to a revolutionary theory: the tension of collective activity and the search for practical mediations, strategic reflection with regard to precise time periods, the ability to connect every conflict with a universal program of emancipation. And if all of this is lacking, it is not—in any event not always or primarily—as a result of some particular intellectual deficiency, but because the social and historical terrain on which such a theoretical intelligence could be born and could unfold has disappeared from under our feet.

Jaime Semprun

 

The reign of commodity spectacle has expanded to embrace all earthly life and energy harnessed by capitalist social relations.  Functioning as a global system of exploitation and commodity-money production, all points, places or agencies external to it have been appropriated or erased; and all centres or foundations within the system that might serve to explain the whole have been absorbed by a global connectedness that renders causal explanation impossible.

Places are effaced by non-places, times are fused in an endless present, from which no real subject can emerge, from which no perspective can be gained, and from within which all truth is impossible.

Radical critical theory thus fades into a past that can only be mimicked as farce; producing only what Jaime Semprun describes as ghosts of formerly living interventions in social life.

We share a last essay by Semprun, in our on going series of the “May 68 writers”, Jaime Semprun, Miguel Amorós, Amadeo Bertolo and Eduardo Colombo.

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Jaime Semprun: For a ruthless criticism of all that exists

Posted on October 20, 2018 by Julius Gavroche

 

In all the representations disseminated by catastrophism, in the way they are elaborated as well as in the conclusions they inspire, we see above all an astonishing accumulation of denials of reality. The most obvious is the one that refers to the ongoing, and already consummated, disaster, which is hidden behind the image of the hypothetical catastrophe, when it is not calculated or extrapolated. In order to be able to understand the extent to which the real disaster differs from the worst scenarios announced by catastrophism, we shall attempt to define it in a few words, or at least specify one of its principle features: by utterly ruining all the material foundations, and not just the material ones, on which it is based, industrial society creates such conditions of insecurity and generalized instability, that only an increase of organization, that is, of submission to the social machinery, can still cause this collection of terrorizing uncertainties to pass for a habitable world.

Jaime Semprun

 

The real catastrophe is not the one that our leaders are announcing, but the persistent blindness of the oppressed majority, which lacks the will to act on the causes of its oppression, and basically wants the same things that are offered by the owners of the world. We must face the fact that the deterioration of life is not driving the masses to revolt but to a condition of submissive adaptation. The most absolute conformism prevails without any effective opposition. Conflicts dissolve with shocking ease among citizens re-educated in green consumerism and internet voting. Disaster management underlies the policies of all States, which are, in their own way, environmentalists. The catastrophism of official propaganda justifies compulsory submission to the directives of a now-“sustainable” domination.

…

Those who try to oppose the system from within, who are treated so badly in the book, will accuse Jaime and René of being pessimists, or even defeatists. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rebels still exist, the critical imagination resides in those who have not thrown in the towel, who have not lost their taste for freedom and who fight to live without constraints …

Miguel Amorós, On Jaime Semprun (libcom.org)

 

The catastrophe of modern capitalist society is now behind us.  Ours is the time of total social collapse (a time that calls for total critique).  The representations of the catastrophe however continue to simplify it as a passing crisis (or at worse, a set of crises) and push it into a hypothetical future.  The promised salvation then lies in further technological innovation and rational management of the conditions of survival.  Ideologues of the “left” and “right” proffer recipes of redemption, but fail or ignore to contest the social relations of alienation which assure the collapse.

The “revolutionary working class” has succumbed to the temptations of spectacular consumption; pseudo-rebels and pseudo-revolutionaries go on about “citizenship”, the virtues of “consensus”, “rights”, “peaceful change”, “democracy”; nationalists sing the virtues of race, soil, religion: and all of this while, “wars” of dispossession and control continue apace, while the life-energy of nature is appropriated and destroyed, and while time, space, subjectivities are erased by the representations of fleeting, seemingly eternal commodities and social relations of exploitation.

Some will dismiss all of this as nonsense, and the purveyors of such ideas as deluded.

It was however from this place of “delusion” that Jaime Semprun insisted on speaking.

The obstinate refusers who attempt to cast doubt upon the benefits, whatever they may be, which the propaganda for oversocialization insists on imposing against all the evidence, and who refuse to enlist with the Sacred Union for the salvation of the planet, can prepare to be treated in the near future as deserters and saboteurs were in times of war. The “state of necessity” and the shortages that will accumulate will first of all force the acceptance or demand for new forms of servitude, in order to preserve what can be preserved of guaranteed survival even if it is only partially successful in this endeavor. (And everyone knows how things stand where no one can boast of such historical conquests.)

The course of this strange war, however, will not fail to create opportunities to engage in the critique in acts of the bureaucratic blackmail. Or, to put it slightly differently: one can predict entropy, but not the rise of something new. The role of the theoretical imagination is still that of discerning, in a present crushed by the probability of the worst-case scenario, the diverse possibilities which nonetheless remain open. Trapped like everyone else within a reality that is as unstable as it is violently destructive, we shall not overlook this datum of experience, which seems to us to be appropriate for resistance: that the action of a few individuals, or of very restricted human groups, can have, with a little luck, effort and will, incalculable consequences.

In our on going series of the “May 68 writers” dedicated to the work of Jaime Semprun, Miguel Amorós, Amadeo Bertolo and Eduardo Colombo, we share a late essay by Semprun, with Renè Riesel (posted on libcom.org).

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Miguel Amorós: The period of decline

Posted on October 14, 2018 by Julius Gavroche

Capitalism, in the late stage of globalization, has abolished all communitarian bonds, autonomous cultures, sociability, collective practices, group identities, etc., stripping individuals of any direct and profound relation with their kind and their environment, and instead setting them at odds. Postmodern man, privileged or marginalized, is a psychological pauper, an unfeeling narcissist with an absolute lack of empathy; when you strip away the appearances and his function is terminated, when face to face with himself he really has nothing but loneliness and emptiness. The most widely-verified social experience in the technological world colonized by the commodity is that of absence and nothingness. This is what alienation is like during the period of decline. Most people try to escape, whether by demanding more security in order to plunge even deeper into a wretched private life, largely virtual and based on a flashy and affected pseudo-individualism [friki—derived from the English word, “freak”], or else by resorting to carefully constructed, and therefore fictitious, identities, seeking refuge, as people did in the past, in ideologies or religions. The times are favorable for both militant escapism and schizophrenia (the two were already connected by Gabel), for both false consciousness as well as for psychopathological reactions against a society that is viewed as a foreign and hostile environment. The doors are equally open to both the opportunity to enclose ourselves in an air-conditioned shell and the opportunity to throw ourselves off a cliff.

…

The revolutionaries of the sixties and seventies underestimated the capacity for survival of the capitalist regime, but they were not mistaken in their diagnosis. The fact that the critical minorities of that era were incapable of transmitting their views to a broader public, does not obviate the circumstance that the degree of dissatisfaction is increasing and that lucid protest can reappear and spread if an idea of another way of life—a crystallization of historical consciousness—can take root in a large enough part of the population where those who have been left behind are well-represented. Shortages and hunger can contribute to this development, but they are not the determining factors. Naturally, survival is the highest priority, but the impossibility of satisfying even the most minimal moral necessities that inform the community spirit is the principal element of revolt. This was true of the proletarian revolutions of the past and this is what can once again characterize the struggles in defense of territory, the only struggles that are currently replete with vital content and a capacity for idealism. The reconstruction of community bonds and the return of reason is still on the horizon of possibilities, but without any guarantees, since sufficient means of self-defense are lacking. Resignation is presently predominant, and careerists, predators and the mentally ill are numerous, but there cannot be the slightest doubt that the statist-market society is destined for the scrap yard. This is the only prediction that can really be made without any risk of being disproven. Of course, this does not imply the automatic triumph of the libertarian cause, for it might in fact signify the contrary—the State might emerge victorious, or nihilist barbarism might prevail—but we cannot entirely rule out the victory of freedom. There is still a lot of thread on the spool. History never stops and a period of darkness can be followed by an era of light.

Miguel Amorós

 

Miguel Amorós was friend and collaborator of Jaime Semprun, working with him on the Encyclopédie des Nuisances.  And it is as such that we share a reflection by him inspired by and in continuity with Semprun’s essay, The abyss repopulates itself.

Amorós’ political baptism came with the not so distant events of May 68 (he was living in spain at the time).  Engaged in anarchist politics both in france and spain, his theoretical work would endeavour to engage with the “rise and fall” of radical political practice from this period until the present.

Miguel Amorós is a writer whose work we have shared before, with essays on the passing of the working class as a revolutionary subject, on the Situationists and May 68, on the ZAD of Notre-dame-des-Landes and on the Catalan independence movement. (click here)  And we post the text below as an engagement with the work of Jaime Semprun and as part of our series of essays authored by Jaime Semprun, Amedeo Bertolo and Eduardo Colombo.

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