Further thoughts on the november 13th attacks in Paris (from CrimethInc) …
We received the following report from the group that produced the French version of To Change Everything, Pour Tout Changer. They describe the situation in Paris before and after the attacks of November 13: the intensification of xenophobic discourse, the repression of homeless refugees, the declaration of a “state of emergency” as a way to clamp down on dissent, the preparations for the COP 21 summit at which demonstrations are now banned, and what people are doing to counter all this. It offers an eyewitness account from the front lines of the struggle against the opportunists who hope to use the tragedy of November 13 to advance their agenda of racism and autocracy. With demonstrations forbidden and the COP 21 summit around the corner, what happens in Paris will set an important precedent for whether governments can use the specter of terrorism to suppress efforts to change the disastrous course on which they are steering us.
Paris, november 13th, isis and neo-fascism: Reading events with Pier-Paolo Pasolini
When I see that young people are in the process of losing their old common values and absorbing the new models imposed by capitalism, running the risk of dehumanising themselves and being prey to an abominable aphasia, to a brutal absence of critical capacity, to a factious passivity, I remember that they were the characteristics of the S.S. – and I see spread over our cities the horrible shadow of the swastika.
Pier-Paolo Pasolini, Scritti corsari
In the world Empire of our times, talk of a “clash of civilisations” (or of “war of religions”, or of any post-colonial variations on the theme), can only function as an ideological obfuscation of our catastrophe. Capitalism is today in effect global, that is, its mechanisms of domination and exploitation, and its apparatuses of subjectivation, leave no corner of the globe untouched. Yet the geography of this Empire is not uniform; its uneven development is planned to the greatest possible degree to secure the conditions of appropriation and accumulation. “Land grabs” in Africa are paralleled by debt driven consumerism and hedonism in the centres of universalising networks of power. Capitalism demands a common subjectivity, while incapable of satisfying the explosion of desires that it leaves in its destructive wake.
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