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…

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.
Read more…

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…

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…

Siné Mensuel: What did the situs mean when they said that situationism doesn’t exist?

Raoul Vaneigem: The situationists were always hostile to ideologies, and to speak of situationism would be to place an ideology where there isn’t one.

Siné Mensuel: Why did you break with the Situationist International in 1970?  In hindsight, what do you think of Guy Debord?

Raoul Vaneigem: I broke [off] because the radicality that had been the priority in May 1968 was in the process of dissolving into bureaucratic behavior. Each member had chosen to pursue his route alone or to abandon the project of a self-managed society. Perhaps Debord and I felt more complicity than affection, but the split doesn’t matter! What is sincerely lived is never lost. The rest is only the dregs of futility.

Siné Mensuel: What’s your take on the Movement of the Indignant?[3]

Raoul Vaneigem: It is a public-safety reaction against the resignation and fear that provide the tyranny of capitalism with its best supports. But indignation isn’t enough. It is less a matter of struggling against a system that is collapsing than in favor of new social structures founded upon direct democracy. While the State is destroying public services, only a self-managing movement can take charge of the well-being of everyone. 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.
Read more…

[editor’s note:  This was another introduction to Anarchist thinking, and another old blog post re-located here.  This text, and other writings of Bonanno can be found translated to English can be found for free online from Digital Elephant, or The Anarchist Library.]

“Capital’s utopia contains something technically mistaken, that is, it wants to do three things that contradict one another:  to assure the wellbeing of a minority, exploit the majority to the limits of survival, and prevent insurgence by the latter in the name of their rights.”

-Bonanno’s points in this text are really to use moments of irrational rioting to institute “an insurrectional and revolutionary reality” before there is ever to be a social revolution, because the communications controls of the ‘included’ classes of society are another manipulation of economy for all those that make up the ‘excluded’ class in post-industrial capitalism that need to be eliminated in order for the excluded to begin freeing themselves and all people of the previous dominating mindset that has been used to control not only the excluded but all peoples in a post-industrial capitalist society.

If I am wrong in this understanding of Bonanno’s text, feel free to correct me or to add any relevant information to enrich my understanding in his anti-political outlook.