Neural Network

[BREAKING WITH CONSENSUS REALITY, From the Politics of Consent to the Seduction of Revolution]
This text is excerpted from the publication TERROR INCOGNITA,
a meditation on desire, insurrection, and the unknown.

We who fight to create a freer world face a fundamental contradiction. On one hand, we don’t want to become a vanguard, “leading” or imposing our will on others, as that would run counter to our anti-authoritarian values. On the other hand, we believe with good justification that our political goals—including the destruction of capitalism, the state, and hierarchy—can’t be accomplished without strategies that are currently unpalatable to most of our fellow citizens. The impoverishment of millions and the destruction of our ecosystems demand that we act decisively. What criteria will equip us to challenge these systems without resorting to the authoritarian means we condemn?

Some of us have developed a practice of prioritizing consent as a provisional answer to this dilemma. This discourse comes to us through educators who promote it as a tool for fostering mutually respectful sexuality in the midst of a rape culture. Applying this model in our intimate relationships and beyond, we seek to respect others’ autonomy by not subjecting them to actions that violate their consent—that is, by staying within the boundaries of others’ desires as they determine and articulate them. We reject coercion of any form, whether physical, verbal, economic, or otherwise, and assert our self-determination to participate in or abstain from whatever we choose.

Yet outside of the sexual realm, consent discourse doesn’t always offer a sufficient framework with which to evaluate direct action tactics and strategy. Knowing whether an action is consensual may not suffice to indicate whether it is effective or worthwhile. Aware that most people oppose some of our tactics, we don’t plan our actions on the basis of consent, yet we don’t aspire to become a vanguard, either. Furthermore, since we can only desire on the basis of what we know, we’re unlikely to achieve liberation from simply fulfilling the desires we have now without changing the conditions that produced them. So how else might we conceive of our political project, if not through the lens of consent?

A close examination of our activities reveals that in setting out to foment insurrection and transform society, we appear to be operating according to a logic of seduction. Are we prepared to accept the implications of this reframing? Let’s begin by examining the politics of consent and their limitations.
Is Consent Enough?

At first glance, the notion of basing our political practice on a theory of consent makes intuitive sense. What’s our critique of the state? It’s a body that wields power over us even to the point of life and death, and yet no one ever asked us if we wanted to be governed. Elections don’t even begin to offer us the meaningful alternatives true consent would require. It’s been said before: our desires will never fit in their ballot boxes. We promote the principle of voluntary association—the freedom to form whatever groups and collectives we want without being compelled to participate in any. We never had the chance to say no to capitalism, to government, to police, to all the systems of hierarchy that impose their rule—so clearly those can’t be consensual in any meaningful way. As we do away with the coercive systems that dominate our lives, we can reconstruct new social relations based on consent: a world in which no one controls anyone else, in which we can determine our own destinies.

It makes sense . . . doesn’t it? Certainly, this discourse of consent offers a compelling way to imagine the world we want to live in. But how does it serve as a strategy for dislodging this one? It’s difficult to envision a political practice that stringently respects the consent of all people while simultaneously destroying the fabric of our hierarchical society. If we insist on the unity of means and ends, we have to dismantle coercive institutions and social relationships through non-coercive processes to build a non-coercive society. Abandoning this vision could undermine the very basis of our anarchism. Yet if we don’t succeed in dislodging capitalism and the state, the bases of economic and political coercion, we’ll never arrive at a society in which a consent-based framework could actually be tenable.

How can we resolve these dilemmas? Let’s look more closely at what we mean by consent, and how it operates in our society and in our movements.
Consensus Reality, Nonviolence, Liberal Consent

Power and consent are critically intertwined. Power imbalances make it difficult or impossible to give consent freely. Can a much older person have consensual sex with a very young person? Can someone who is subjected to another’s economic control freely consent to that person’s desires? For consent to be meaningful, it must be possible to say no, any time and for any reason, on one’s own terms. When the state monopolizes the use of force and the economy controls access to our very means of survival, we cannot meaningfully choose. We call the boundaries enclosing our ability to consent under these conditions consensus reality.
Read more…

http://anarchistinternational.org/wordpress/?page_id=344

IX.

On History, Repression, and the Infinite

This is the first of three expositions detailing our final three barriers.

History:

The Mexican Guerrilla and Forgetfulness

History tells us that the Nazis cleansed Berlin of Jews in the days leading up to 1936 Summer Olympics. Before everyone arrived from abroad, the Jews had been pushed out of sight, the brutality and pogroms hidden away. The city was brightened, the roads were cleaned, and the shops were open. Three years earlier, Hitler had presided over May Day celebrations, having successfully hijacked the ideas of socialism and revolution from the Marxists, many of whom also happened to be Jews. In 1945, Hitler killed himself and had his body burnt. The war he started before his death consigned the world to its current fate of authoritarian domination. Long after he died, the SS patrolled the streets and Nazi rockets filled the sky.

In 1968, the students of Mexico City (DF) began boarding buses and handing out literature, marching in the streets against the PRI government, and withstanding heavy assaults by the police. They fought to free their imprisoned friends, to keep beauty alive, and to destroy the capitalist terror around them. They were executed in cold rooms after defending the occupied UNAM, the wandered drunkenly down Insurgentes knowing their future was gone, they fucked in dirty bathrooms knowing the world was against them, and they witnessed the tumultuous expansion of the world revolutionary Geist before their intoxicated eyes. Some of them were part of the Anarchist International, although we may never know to what extent.
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From Whither Buro
By Way of Introduction

Thus in the midst of their greatest festivities, though physically thronging together, they live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit and will, scarcely any two being able to agree since each follows his own pleasure and caprice. By reason of all this, providence decrees that, through obstinate factions and desperate civil wars, they shall turn their cities into forests and the forests into dens and lairs of men. . . Hence peoples who have reached this point of premeditated malice, when they receive this last remedy of providence and are thereby stunned and brutalized, are sensible no longer of comforts, delicacies, pleasures and pomp, but only of the sheer necessities of life. And the few survivors in the midst of an abundance of things necessary for life naturally become sociable, and, returning to the primitive simplicity of the first world of peoples, are again religious, truthful and faithful.

-Vico, Scienza Nuova
[and humble too!]

1. It comes to pass, at last: this great Leviathan that has swallowed the whole world, now commences its death agony. The mechanical man likened unto the perfected State, with unweeping eyes and unfeeling heart, rusts from its own internal emptiness. The clockwork society breaks down. And the returning ghost towns, like a forgotten malediction, return to gaze mournfully at the passing of the glory of the world. The suburbs, this great gilded prison, agonize as they are left to return to nature, to slowly decay in their false-seeming gentility. The streetlights no longer illuminate the night on the edge of town, but cede way to their precursors, of which they are only the sad imitation, the moon and stars. The roads crumble into gravel, and from thence return to dust that they always were. Like unto like, America “is the nothingness that reduces itself to nothingness”, in the words of Hegel. Such are the heart-rending times the Americans inhabit.
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In May 2011, tens of thousands occupied plazas throughout Spain in a protest movement that prefigured similar occupations around the world, including the Occupy movement in the United States. On March 29, 2012, a nationwide general strike erupted into massive street-fighting in Barcelona, as participants wrested control of the streets from riot police. How did this come to pass, and what can it tell us about what will follow the occupation movements outside Spain?
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from 325:

Eat (Reyhard Rumbayan) is serving a 1 year 8 month jail term for burning down an ATM bank with fellow comrade Billy Augustan, as members of the Long Live Luciano Tortuga Cell – FAI/IRF.

–

Dear comrades, proud ‘members’ of FAI/IRF Global, our imprisoned friends of the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire, and all the groups, individuals, who dedicate their lives to end the mega-machine of control and domination and to all the anarcho-heretics.

It’s been quite long since I wrote an open-letter. I don’t know, all the circumstances here were sometimes too hectic to even try to focus on writing something. A mixture of personal-feelings for my loved ones, the process of the trial, and millions of ideas that sometimes came like a rain of stars. And I’m sure that we all miss the stars, the overwhelming feelings of our unlimited universe, possibility and it’s nihilistic essence. I must say that I’m still fortunate that they kept me inside a cage in this ‘Non’ maximum security prison. But my purpose here is not to tell ‘boring’ stories about the prison conditions I am in, for I know it only too well, it is merely a physical prison, a miniature of our modern society. But one cannot say that there’s no difference between here and outside. A physical prison is still the most worst place for a free person to be in. No one—no matter what crime they done — should be kept in prison.
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Anarchist graffiti is generally boring and repetitive.
Since I want better graffiti and am a genius, here’s a long list of possible slogans to write:

‘Wrong’ is the name that power gives to all that we need to destroy it.
Cash ruins everything around me.
A cause not to die for.
A day of normality is more violent than a month of insurrection.
A limit is only something we haven’t destroyed yet.
A mask is a face you can trust.
A prole is anyone who doesn’t control their life and knows it.
A rupture a day keeps submission away.
A world of play to win, and nothing to lose but boredom.
ACAB: All cats are brilliant.
Act your rage.
Actually fighting for your freedom.
ACϟAB Read more…

No one should ever work.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.

That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child’s play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn’t passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act. Oblomovism and Stakhanovism are two sides of the same debased coin.

The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality. So much the worse for “reality,” the gravity hole that sucks the vitality from the little in life that still distinguishes it from mere survival. Curiously — or maybe not — all the old ideologies are conservative because they believe in work. Some of them, like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else. Read more…

from Liberación Total (March 27, 2012) via This is our Job:

Street protests against the attacks of capitalist States on our living conditions have recently spread throughout Europe. Despite the strikes, actions, and massive demonstrations, and despite the broad movements that haven’t even expressed any grand revolutionary aspirations beyond the mere defense of minimum basic necessities, the States have responded with indifference.

Appealing to confusing economic formulas, numbers, statistics, and abstract concepts, those States have tried to locate the problem’s origin in inaccessible, metaphysical realities. However, the origin and causes of our daily problems have no metaphysical foundation whatsoever. Poverty, exploitation, repression, and systematic abuse are the results of very concrete structures, of specific decisions taken by specific people who have specific interests.

One such structure is called the College of Business Administration and Management (ESADE). Nestled in the middle of the wealthy Pedralbes neighborhood, this school produces a stream of executives who—day after day—order, manage, and benefit from the destruction of the lives of the great majority of the population. Each year, the school propels social predators into the world, and for the rest of their lives they dedicate themselves to plundering and trampling on this country’s exploited from their institutional (like the presidency of the Generalitat itself, occupied by Artur Mas) or corporate positions. Read more…

from liberaciontotal, transl waronsociety:

On Propaganda
In solidarity with the comrades from Culmine and the spaces of propaganda raided by the Italian State

A couple of weeks ago, a group of Italian comrades were arrested in Florence passing out leaflets against the death of an immigrant at the hands of the police. The guardians of order inserted this arrest into a new repressive operation against anarchist comrades. By means of the operations, with raids on houses and confiscation of personal objects, the police seized and abducted the emails of the blogs ParoleArmate, Culmine and Iconoclasta and accused some compas of subversive crimes.

From our small trench of propaganda we send our support to the investigated compas and to our brothers of Culmine and the rest of the raided virtual spaces, thanks to which we can find our what other compas from distant places are doing and thinking and share with them our reflections on the context of struggle in our territory. We know that sooner than later, with the same or another project, we will have them back. Read more…

Madonna, “Are We Having Fun Yet?”, supermarket tabloids, Milli Vanilli, virtual reality, “shop `till you drop,” PeeWee’s Big Adventure, New Age/computer `empowerment’, mega-malls, Talking Heads, comic-strip movies, `green’ consumption. A build-up of the resolutely superficial and cynical. Toyota commercial: “New values: saving, caring — all that stuff;” Details magazine: “Style Matters;” “Why Ask Why? Try Bud Dry;” watching television endlessly while mocking it. Incoherence, fragmentation, relativism — up to and including the dismantling of the very notion of meaning (because the record of rationality has been so poor?); embrace of the marginal, while ignoring how easily margins are made fashionable. “The death of the subject” and “the crisis of representation.”

Postmodernism. Originally a theme within aesthetics, it has colonized “ever wider areas,” according to Ernesto Laclau, “until it has become the new horizon of our cultural, philosophical, and political experience.” “The growing conviction,” as Richard Kearney has it, “that human culture as we have known it…is now reaching its end.” It is, especially in the U.S., the intersection of poststructuralist philosophy and a vastly wider condition of society: both specialized ethos and, far more importantly, the arrival of what modern industrial society has portended. Postmodernism is contemporaneity, a morass of deferred solutions on every level, featuring ambiguity, the refusal to ponder either origins or ends, as well as the denial of oppositional approaches, “the new realism.” Signifying nothing and going nowhere, pm [postmodernism] is an inverted millenarianism, a gathering fruition of the technological `life’-system of universal capital. It is not accidental that Carnegie-Mellon University, which in the ’80s was the first to require that all students be equipped with computers, is establishing “the nation’s first poststructuralist undergraduate curriculum.” Read more…