Again, we thank the not bored collective for sharing their translation of the following interview with Raoul Vaneigem and published with the Belgian newspaper Le Soir.
Humanity is in the process of dying so that an economy in which mad money spins round and round, digging its own grave, can survive.
Raoul Vaneigem
The Elementary Roots of Raoul Vaneigem(1)
What kind of environment did you grow up in? Did your childhood prepare the way for the rest of your journey?
My childhood took place in Lessines, a small working-class town [in Belgium].(2) The rock quarries defined the slums in which I lived, as opposed to the nice places, which were principally occupied by the bourgeoisie. At the time, class consciousness was, you might say, punctuated by the sirens that at specific times signaled the beginning and the end of work, pauses and accidents. My father, a railroad worker, regretted not being able to pursue university studies due to a lack of financial resources. He dreamed of a better fate for me, but not without warning me about those who became “traitors to their class” by climbing the social ladder. I owe to him the reservations that I had early on about the roles of the intellectual – guide, tribune, master thinker. The repugnance that is felt today concerning the deterioration of the so-called “elites” confirms the soundness of my reluctance. In La liberté enfin s’éveille au souffle de la vie,(3) I show how and why the rulers are becoming increasingly stupid. Anyone who takes a step back from the harassment of media lies can easily verify the following: intellectual intelligence decreases with an increase in power, and sensible intelligence progresses in the presence of what is truly human. I have always accorded pride of place to the pleasures of knowledge, exploration, and the dissemination of acquired knowledge. I see curiosity – along with love, creation and solidarity – as the passionate attractions that are the most vital to the construction of the human being. But this is precisely what continues to be suffocated by a system that shamelessly calls “education” the “get out of my way” mindset in which the competitive market gathers up its slaves.
I am not an expert in anything.(4) My Mouvement du libre esprit(5) responds to the desire to examine more closely the Middle Ages, to which historians somewhat hastily attribute a general adhesion to the Christian faith. My Résistance au christianisme(6) responds to the playful preoccupation that, to me, has always rejoiced in being “untouched by God,” according to Prévert’s beautiful formulation.(7) The best critique of this amiably subversive pastime has come from the “Yellow Vests,” (8) who rightly believe that existential and social struggles outweigh such trifles as religious, political and philosophical opinions.
FRANCE, Paris. 11th arrondissement. Worker and student demonstration from Republique to Denfert-Rochereau. (about 1000000 demonstrators) May 13th, 1968.
To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability… All photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.
Susan Sontag, On Photography
For Bruno Barbey (1941-2020)
The illusion of photography lies in its apparent immediacy, in its capacity to interpellate by congealing the movement and the transience of events, thereby leaving space for our imaginary to appropriate the image to a degree of great intensity. Photography is thus an art with a universal language, in the words of Bruno Barbey; universal because the desire to “capture” time subjectively is shared by all.
The photographer Bruno Barbey, along with his extensive photographic work, would capture the events of May 68 in France as few others.
L’art est comme l’incendie, il naît de ce qui brûle/Art is like fire, it is born of what burns.
Jean-Luc Godard
We have waited so much for the end of this world, we just didn’t imagine it like this. When the end approaches, when the masks fall, when the din of nonsense covers the planet, there also emerge the voices of those who, at this precise moment, in the fissure, are able to speak (of) life.
The maturity of man – that means, to have reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child at play.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
A fragment from the prologue to Amador Fernández Savater’s recently published essay, Habitar y gobernar; inspiraciones para una nueva concepción política (Ned ediciones, 2020). (lobo suelto 15/10/2020)
What to do is the quintessential question of the classical revolutionary imaginary, posed by Lenin in the book of the same title. It is the question of a model: the dominant model of revolution in the 20th century, both triumphant (as a seizure of power) and a complete failure (as an experience of emancipation).
There were, of course, other revolutions in the twentieth century (such as the Mexican or the Spanish), but they were somehow obscured by “the shadow of October”. October became the model of every revolution, the physiognomy of the revolution, exported all over the world. The images of change in October became the images of change par excellence: of what had to be done, of what could be expected, etc.
The social malaise spreads moment by moment. The endless sequence of confinement – de-confinement – re-confinement – is the rope that slowly asphyxiates us. It is the rope that a State, incapable and seized by panic, holds to, to try to impose its new normal. Now we know that the announced new normal is nothing more than the continuation of this nightmare. When it all started, it seemed that we were in a science fiction movie, and that we were masked protagonists. The contained emotion of the first month was made up of fear and relief; the fear of dying and the relief of not having to work. The balconies strove to open up to the sky. Now there are no songs. The slogan “Everything will be fine” sounds even more stupid, and we have learned that we are only the useful fools of a moment in the history of capitalism. The plot can be summed up in a few words: unbridled capitalism – what is usually known as neoliberalism – produces a virus that capitalism itself reuses to control us. In the silence of the night subjected to a curfew, the cry of “Enough!” is heard. We are tired, fed up with so much uncertainty, fed up with so many falsehoods and, above all, fed up with so much arbitrariness.
The Latin expression is a biblical quotation that Pierre-Joseph Proudhon put on the cover of his fundamental work, The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty (1846), and it reflects very well the dual approach that anarchism has given to the struggle against domination and oppression. On the one hand, the clear understanding that key aspects of the dominant system cannot be recovered, but rather have to be radically confronted. It is the radicalism that is also shown in successive confrontational tactics at different times in anarchism’s history, in which destruam has been used in a literal sense, with a propaganda of the deed that smelled more of gunpowder and death than of the construction of a new world. It is the one that is still present in slogans that we can hear in a demonstration, such as “A fired worker, a hung employer”. In this case, it has more of an innocuous bravado than a serious threat, but in other cases it is clear that violent opposition is needed at a certain moment, a position that the Black Bloc consistently picks up, or that Peter Gelderloos supports in his essay against of non-violence as a priority strategy. Domination and oppression will not fall without a serious “push” to bring them down.
However, I return to the deep ethical sense of anarchism, for which the ethical criterion that must regulate all actions of struggle and radical transformation of society must be the coherence between ends and means: the end never justifies the means. The use of violence, which in some cases may be justified, is a rather incoherent resource in order to build a free and solidary society. Mikhail Bakunin himself was clear: «But be careful! A problem solved by force is still a problem”. In classical Spanish anarchism, some thinkers were very reluctant to use violence, such as Ricardo Mella, and others resisted, such as Salvador Seguí, although they had to face the extreme violence of the bosses’ gunmen.
Mutual aid is the over-riding principle in human existence. It is greater than that of class struggle, which is the result of impositions upon society. Faced with a child drowning, only those inculcated with the artificial pressures of capitalism will ask what profit he will gain by diving in. Only those coarsened by racially divisive propaganda will ask first about the ethnic origins of the child (one recalls Bessie Smith bleeding to death, refused admission to a “whites only” hospital). Only those who have succumbed to State conditioning will walk around plaintively asking, “What are they doing about it? Where are the police, the fire brigade, the coastguards? What do we pay our taxes for?”
Repatriating Indigenous land and organizing anti-state Indigenous-Black-POC Power alternatives is better than pouring resources into the liberal-progressive vote.
Let Empire collapse: why we need a decolonial revolution
Mohamed Abdou
I am part of a We that says: “Let Empire collapse.” A We that says to build alternatives to Empire, we must expose the illegitimacy of the dreadful dream we are in. Instead of trying to shore or salvage the world as it is, we need to recognize with Audre Lorde that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
I am part of a We that says: “We love and respect you, Angela Davis and your behemoth ongoing legacy of indispensable teachings that are fundamental to the centuries-old struggle we confront,” but we will not be castigated into voting or fall into the trap of “lesser of two evil” arguments that have been critiqued time and time again.
Italian authorities have blamed “fringe elements” for the violence during the anti-lockdown protests, but the reality on the ground tells a different story.
The complexity of Italy’s anti-lockdown protests
I wasn’t surprised by what I saw, we have said this over and over: another lockdown without a welfare support system was a ticking time bomb.
Alfonso De Vito, Napolitano activist Interviewed by Sarah Gainsworth for Dinamo Press
Salvatore Prinzi
Over the past weeks, the people of Naples have been protesting further public health restrictions proposed by the regional government to halt the spread of the coronavirus. Following months of relatively low case numbers during the summer, COVID-19 is on the rise in Italy, and the national government along with various municipalities are re-instituting closures of commercial businesses including cafes, bars, movie theaters, gyms and so on.
Raoul Vaneigem: … the best reading, the most difficult and enthralling, remains the reading of oneself
Again, we thank the not bored collective for sharing their translation of the following interview with Raoul Vaneigem and published with the Belgian newspaper Le Soir.
Humanity is in the process of dying so that an economy in which mad money spins round and round, digging its own grave, can survive.
Raoul Vaneigem
The Elementary Roots of Raoul Vaneigem(1)
What kind of environment did you grow up in? Did your childhood prepare the way for the rest of your journey?
My childhood took place in Lessines, a small working-class town [in Belgium].(2) The rock quarries defined the slums in which I lived, as opposed to the nice places, which were principally occupied by the bourgeoisie. At the time, class consciousness was, you might say, punctuated by the sirens that at specific times signaled the beginning and the end of work, pauses and accidents. My father, a railroad worker, regretted not being able to pursue university studies due to a lack of financial resources. He dreamed of a better fate for me, but not without warning me about those who became “traitors to their class” by climbing the social ladder. I owe to him the reservations that I had early on about the roles of the intellectual – guide, tribune, master thinker. The repugnance that is felt today concerning the deterioration of the so-called “elites” confirms the soundness of my reluctance. In La liberté enfin s’éveille au souffle de la vie,(3) I show how and why the rulers are becoming increasingly stupid. Anyone who takes a step back from the harassment of media lies can easily verify the following: intellectual intelligence decreases with an increase in power, and sensible intelligence progresses in the presence of what is truly human. I have always accorded pride of place to the pleasures of knowledge, exploration, and the dissemination of acquired knowledge. I see curiosity – along with love, creation and solidarity – as the passionate attractions that are the most vital to the construction of the human being. But this is precisely what continues to be suffocated by a system that shamelessly calls “education” the “get out of my way” mindset in which the competitive market gathers up its slaves.
I am not an expert in anything.(4) My Mouvement du libre esprit(5) responds to the desire to examine more closely the Middle Ages, to which historians somewhat hastily attribute a general adhesion to the Christian faith. My Résistance au christianisme(6) responds to the playful preoccupation that, to me, has always rejoiced in being “untouched by God,” according to Prévert’s beautiful formulation.(7) The best critique of this amiably subversive pastime has come from the “Yellow Vests,” (8) who rightly believe that existential and social struggles outweigh such trifles as religious, political and philosophical opinions.
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