Neural Network

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…

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.
Read more…

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…

[editor’s note: This was one of the first works read in the initial discovery of Anarchism, and one we have transferred to this blog from the old blog. Some quotes were thougt to be pertinent to others as well.]

“Anarchy or no anarchy, the people must eat and be provided with the necessities of life. The cities must be provisioned and vital services cannot be disrupted.”

“The progress of the new society will depend greatly upon the extent to which its self-governing units will be able to speed up direct communication–to understand each other’s problems and better coordinate activities.”

“One of the most cogent contributions of anarchism to social theory is the proper emphasis on how political institutions, in turn, mold economic life.”