Neural Network

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.
Read more…

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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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…

From Hommodolars Contrainformación (August 12, 2010) via Liberación Total (July 30, 2010): http://thisisourjob.wordpress.com/2011/09/10/a-much-needed-invitation-to-discuss-the-offensive-against-the-state-capital-and-all-forms-of-authority/

Note from TIOJ: As you can see, this piece has been in our “translation queue” for just over a year now. We finally decided to finish it because we feel it’s a worthwhile addition to the general discourse surrounding insurrectionary praxis. Some of the ideas have already been applied by various groups, while others prefigure certain events of the past year. In any case, many thanks to the comrades who wrote it, and we apologize for the delay!
Read more…

Breaking from immediate, vital relationships with the communities of living beings in nature and progress of specialization and division of labour among men, stand for the famous beginning of agricultural and industrial civilization. Since then, with each new generation, people experience nature all the more mediate, increasingly distance themselves from it, isolate and sterilize dead environments in which they live, work, consume, and have fun. Danger, dirt and chaos lurk behind the walls of comfortable flats, schools, hospitals and prisons! The driving force of that deviation, in which terminal phase we live today, is the feverish urge for establishing control and domination over the nature. The fields which were once the habitats of thousands of plant species, are now covered with a single industrial monoculture. Lined up in columns and rows like an army, selected, modified and chemically treated for generations, these plants are the reflection of people’s situation, as well.
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Posted on September 13, 2011 by actforfreedomnow:  http://actforfreedomnow.wordpress.com/2011/09/13/%e2%80%98rain-fire%e2%80%99-%e2%80%93-statement-from-a-uk-fai-sector/

‘Rain & Fire’ – Statement from a UK FAI sector

325 receives and transmits:   Rain & Fire  

This text was written during the course of the growing European social war, and our attempts to situate ourselves in the context of that, whilst in the midst of rising fascism, complicity from most of the society and a fractured and divisive anti-capitalist ‘movement’. These scant few pages cannot express the complexity of the various situations being described in any great depth, but we write so that other rebels at the edges can know how it is for us here. As we were putting the final touches to the text, cities in the UK exploded and remain volatile. However this is not an analysis of the riots – this is a text from inside the social conditions which gave rise to the insurrection.  

This text has been collaboratively written by many individuals in our network over a period of discussion, planning and attack. We have been brief in our communiques so far, but we felt it was time to write something longer.  

“Why are we writing?” Because we know how important it has been for us to hear the knocks on the wall from other renegades in other cells, and because we would like to reach out beyond the people we already know, beyond the realities we have lived in, created, abandoned or remain tied to. As revolutionaries, we are highly critical of these realities and of ourselves, and we write because just, as individuals, we strive to be ‘better’ than we are, we also desire for this world to be better than it is. We are open to the fallacy of our opinions and wish to surpass our expectations, such as they are. We also try to communicate with those outside our circles, and we attempt to staunch the tendency towards self-referentialism which is endemic to many forms of communication. In the end, we have to accept that this text is written to persons unknown and that wherever it is read and whoever it reaches, there will be those who will have an understanding of what is written here – and this is for them.  

There is no longer any sure statement that can be made about this changing world, which catches fire more and more, everyday.  

The present day United Kingdom is a controlled theme-park, covered in surveillance cameras, vehicle tracking, identical housing estates, post-industrial zones and sprawling road and train networks. There is virtually no wilderness left, the powerful and rich control the ‘countryside’, as much as, or even more than the cities, and there is little freedom beyond the mainstream, unless you take it – the same as anywhere else. The prison of everyday life is so total here that the only choice remaining is its complete destruction.  

We welcomed the renewed call by the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire / Informal Anarchist Federation for a world-wide informal anarchist structure based on revolutionary solidarity and direct action: the International Revolutionary Front. As we continue to develop our own project of revolutionary organisation, we affirm the global informal ‘network’ or ‘federation’ of revolutionary groups in existence who are developing, encouraging and participating in uncontrollable confrontation against State and Capital, whilst organising and developing their own initiatives of attack: this is our signal of collaboration. Read more…