24 October 2012

Letter from Lhasa, number 288.
L'insurrection qui vient ... mais sans aller nulle part!


Letter from Lhasa, number 288. L'insurrection qui vient ... mais sans aller nulle part!
by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Comité invisible, L'insurrection qui vient, La fabrique éditions, Paris, France, 2007. 
(Comité invisible 2007).
Comité invisible


This essay is literary elegant, with the usage of paradoxical language and skilful employ of apocalyptic expressions. However, one needs to rationally analyse the contents of a work.

It may be true that present times are hopeless ...for people not wanting or not been able to change their daily lives. In addition, whatever nihilist or insurrectionalist political manifesto needs to claim that it be the end of times. Anyway, also hopeless situations tend to reproduce themselves, even infinitely. It is easy to confuse one’s own attitude or state of mind with external conditions.

Very rarely there are stagnant situations without any possible way out. Reality changes also without hope, which is just a psychological posture. ‘Hopeless’ people just contemplate, and sometimes exploit, other people improvements, or, simply, marginalize themselves.    

People [claimed] autonomy, but with French Jacobeans rhetoric, evidences a discomfort without imagining and practicing any solution to it. It is a reality that State/government has destroyed society and sociality. There is nothing to do. State is the louses’ kingdom with the worst louses as rulers. However, that does not represent the end of times.   

There is no solution to this society’s destruction, if not perhaps in old religions if they could be really autonomous from State what nowadays they are not. Even if these old, or also new, religions, traditions, have their drawbacks when they try to create they alternatives to the current orders.  

We have now referred to ‘society’ with the meaning of ‘civil society’, frequently used as something different and opposed to ‘political society’, alias State/government. The distinction is more theoretical than with solid bases in reality. They can be seen as two different and sometimes opposed kinds of society and sociality, while actually civil society largely depends on State/government.

The autonomous self-organization of private interests is something more imagined or wished than really happening. And State/government is another form of society and sociality. Even without any State/government, whatever self-organization of private interests would rapidly evolve in State/government for the simple reason that ‘democracy’ would not be sustainable, people are not equal and ‘democracy’ does not solve any problem. Whatever executive structure becomes a policy maker, not only or overall a policy implementer, and frequently for its same interests, although making to believe some its own general and unsubstitutable function.

This is neither a solution to anything, nor a different society or sociality: “«Devenir autonome», cela pourrait vouloir dire, aussi bien: apprendre à se battre dans la rue, à s’accaparer des maisons vides, à ne pas travailler, à s’aimer follement et à voler dans les magasins.” (Comité invisible 2007, p. 26). It would be only a form of parasitism, as a lot of other options, relatively to the current reality and without any innovation or improvement relatively to it. That may be a necessity, some momentary reaction, not the creation of something different from the stigmatized order or regime.  

It is a classic anarchist myth of the Workers Autonomy to be ‘against the work’. It is a consequence of opulent economies, where intensive working is less and less explicable, although people, from the other side, need motivations, to reach achievements, to feel active and sometimes important. An imposed work is, for the large majority, a very good motivation, the motivation of accumulating wealth or, simply, of bills and bills to be paid.   

This same manifesto tells that the same French State/government detests capitalism, entrepreneurs, because it wound like to control and, if possible, suppress whatever residual autonomous ‘civil society’ so even the private economic world, formally private entrepreneurship: “Les managers, leurs moeurs et leur littérature ont beau parade en public, il reste autour d’eux un cordon sanitaire de ricanement, un océan de mépris, une mer de sarcasmes. L’entrepreneur ne fait pas partie de la famille. À tout prendre, dans la hiérarchie de la détestation, on lui préfère le flic. Être fonctionnaire reste, contre vents et marées, contre golden boys et privatisations, la définition entendue du bon travail.” (Comité invisible 2007, p. 28).

If the same French ‘bourgeois order’ detests private entrepreneurs, French communists, anarchists, far-rightists etc work for their claimed enemies. They are their cultural by-product.

...Do you understand why France is genetically inferior to the Anglophone area where some economic autonomy is neither opposed nor simply tolerated? On the contrary, economic autonomy is there encouraged from and functionalised to the Crown for its fiscal extraction and for its same Imperial policies.

As the authors show, to whatever element of strength and power of a certain order corresponds new weaknesses. Technology is power and, at the same time, new weaknesses. As common to the other ‘subversives’, they avoid to evidence that that ‘diabolic’ technologized order frequently has in key positions, even in the repressive ones, idiots. Geniuses invent and produce, while idiots are in charge of the system. And those who are not idiot need to simulate to be such, and to behave as such, for not being fired. There is a totalitarian system but without heart and without brain, acephalus. What means that frequently, not always, individual actions and perceptions determine this system actions and reactions.

For instance, instead of affirming themselves in some way outside this totalitarian system, there are people consciously or de facto acting in ways activating this system against them. One may claim to pursue one’s own autonomy while de facto pursuing only one’s own dependency.      

Reality always is a representation, overall for States/governments inventing, imposing, their legitimacy. The legitimacy of State/government is not formal democracy. Whatever State/government, whatever regime, has general elections ...even the UK-USA! General elections are just shows for testing how people are impotent and subordinated. The legitimacy of a State/government is the imposition of the belief that it provide some public good. Since that, State/government invented useless wars, criminality etc.

By creating insecurity in hidden ways, a State/government shows it provides some solution, some security. ...Creating a problem è Providing a pseudo-solution è Creating other problems è Creating other pseudo-solutions for showing you (State/government) are indispensable. The nowadays fiscal crisis (it is not the first one in the world history) derives from bureaucratic proliferations determined from useless ‘services’, wars and ‘security’.

If you State/government do not want anymore wars, stop creating and fighting them! If you State/government do not want anymore terrorism, stop creating and managing it! If you State-government do not want any more organized criminality, stop creating and managing it! ...Unmask that if you want to do something perhaps useful but without any illusion you can change anything. It is more probable everything implode since unsustainability, although there rarely are necessary outcomes. Even unsustainability can self-organize in new, unknown, forms, without any necessary collapse.

The positivist (pseudo-Marxian) vision of a theoretically linear development of societal forms has no real foundation. Historical research shows that even a precise characterization of different social orders be arduous and frequently impossible. Physics’ determinist and reversible systems, and chaos theories, provide considerable more tolls for societal analysis and representation than positivist (pseudo-Marxian) visions of necessary developments.

Power uses the domination tools it needs. Sense-making, storytelling, has no connection with what happens at structural level. Basically, structural levels are combinations of tools without any concern for whatever labelling of them. ...Engels was just a wealthy uncomfortable chap, making sense of his discomfort telling and writing that his problems were historical problem... Those have been called ‘socio-economic formation’ are just scholastic formalisms without any connection with reality. Reality shows a permanent and changing combination of characteristics that scholastic visions have attributed to the various ‘socio-economic formations’. There are technological changes. There are not qualitative jumps, ruptures, cleavages, in the field of socio-economic relations. If one deeply investigated the real difference between feudal (or even slave) and bourgeois orders, usually considered so different, one could not find any real opposition. Appearances, more than forms, change, not substance. About that, tale telling paradigms, ideologies, have been created, not really science permitting societal understanding. What has been called bourgeoisie has created theories about its difference, novelty and superiority, so it has created its ideological ‘enemies’ ...actually working for it! 

No regime changes because ‘wrong’ or because people want to collapse it, not even because its structural level need to break current social structures (basically the same through the ages). The concept of ‘people’ is an abstraction and a deception. People are manipulated from the same few really in power. What current propaganda calls ‘revolutions’ are manipulation from internal and world powers. The so mythicized Russian 1917 one was a work of the German military intelligence and, later, Soviet Russia was taken over from the Anglo-Americans for freezing key parts of Europe, Asia and Africa. If one prefers to believe in tales, ...no problem! However, all the theories of revolutions and counter-revolution have showed themselves as ideological syllogisms without any connection with reality. They were and are just propaganda for deceiving ignorant and naive people.

The proposal to create communes and to use these communes for living without working is an old illusion. Of course, if there are revenues it is possible to live without working... A bit later, this living without working becomes the need creating an alternative economy. Finally, this ‘alternative economy’ inevitably operates inside given orders. It is the impasse of all ‘alternative’ models. Inevitably, one creates another mini-State, absolutely similar to the one that one declares to fight, but claiming this ‘other State’ as alternative. ...No problem, if some people like to do that, ...however without any illusion to have solved any problem or to have overcome any order one declared to oppose, or to refuse, or to fight.  

The myth of secret and anonymous conspiracy and action is only useful for feeling as part of a diffused movement there is not. The vision of Communes, as basic unit of a partisan reality, there is in whatever statu nascenti and in whatever simulation of a statu nascenti.

The authors suggest insurrection as multiplication and coordination of communes. OK. And later? The outcome would be another State absolutely equal or even worse than the previous one, if one could realize what wished.

They exalt the 2006 Mexicane case of the Oaxaca State, a protest movement against a corrupted and repressive governor, and the Argentinean blockades. In practice, it is the classic myth of the insurrectionalist general strike. It is just a myth. In the quoted examples, nothing really alternative was built and could not be built. There are always small groups or intellectuals claiming of a going on revolution and later stigmatizing the failed and betrayed revolution, while real people mobilized for thousands of other reasons. The conditions of Mexico and Argentina are well known. So, such movements were expressions of deteriorated contexts without being alternative or solutions to them. They are temporary negations, destructions, not creative destructions for building something else.

The for-somebody-unpleasant truth is that all revolutions are lead from fractions of the same power they declare to assault. Actually, all revolutions take over the existing State/government ...for preserving it! They change the political form, more precisely political rhetoric, letting all the rest absolutely equal, eventually worsening it adding new clients to the old State/government structures.

People exalting ‘revolutions’ really should materialistically analyse the so-claimed ‘October Russian revolution’. It was a clandestine operation of the German Army intelligence for collapsing Russia, a war enemy. Since Russia was a strategic enemy of Western powers, also in the pre-WW1 phase whatever Russian ‘revolutionary’ was generously subsidized from Western power. Secret Police department used local social-democracies, and other parties or organizations, for doing that. If one wants materialistically analyze reality, one needs to track the money, in this case who funded ‘revolutionaries’. Of course, those who have been abundantly subsidized from Western powers, as Trotsky and Lenin were, do not like that. They love tale telling. 

This clandestine operation of the German Army intelligence was exploited from fractions of the Russian State/government, from Russian bureaucracies, for creating a war economy and so powerful Russian armed forces. Nevertheless the attempt to create a strong Russian bureaucratic State/government miserably failed on the long run. However the model was proposed again, only, now, under the form of a para-State private capitalism. There is now the advantage that the Russian State/government has not to provide to the needs of everybody and it can claim that problems depend on ‘markets laws’ while the post-KGB, alias real State/government, remains omnipotent. The ‘advantages’ for the Soviet/Russia people?! ...A pitiless and terrorist slavery! Between ‘reds’ and ‘whites’ no anarchist or other revolution would have been possible. Mutatis mutandis, it is everywhere, in whatever epoch, the same. ‘Revolutions’ are ex-post tale telling, ‘making-sense’, propaganda. As ‘democracy’ or ‘liberalizations’ are other tale telling. There is the usual fight of everybody against everybody under different tale telling, and some secondary different legal/formal frame and constraints.    

No problem, if some people like this kind of ‘activities’, although it be a sterile way, an impasse, a cul-de-sac, an agitation without any positive outcome. People liking this kind of activities are finally manipulated from power.

‘The alternative’?! Frequently there is no alternative. Accepting that there are no alternatives generally open minds and spirits to other personal and collective achievements and fulfilments. Oppressive powers spasmodically need ‘revolutionaries’, for manipulating them, for squeezing/exploiting and discarding/liquidating them, ...and going on using them even after having defeated and liquidated them. The cop needs the revolutionary and the criminal. If there are not, the cop invents, creates, them. Let the cop become useless. If one kills one cop, one legitimizes that one become ten. Let the cop become useless. ...If you can, you can use it as a gardener and as a cleaner.  

A very light State/government (something between “That government is best which governs least” and “That government is best which governs not at all”) would be the real innovation, what cannot be done by insurrectionalist assaults. Or perhaps it is just a libertarian dream. Anyway, modernization courses have no connection with what are called ‘revolutions’. They obey to different logic and they are the product of different contexts and dynamics. Actually, all the developmental [strong modernising] courses were generated and led from regimes the current political and politological vulgate would define as ‘reactionary’. Evidently they were not such, in certain or in many contexts. Is ‘reactionary’ or ‘conservative’ or ‘authoritarian’ what develops and ‘revolutionary’ what sinks everybody into underdevelopment? ...Nonsense... Reality cannot be seriously analysed and discussed by ideological/political frames, and by deceiving concepts.      

“Tout le pouvoir aux communes!”: what would be the difference relatively to the present order? If the police and the army become red or black, are they different from the ‘republican’ ones? Freedom is certainly a positive value. Historically, democracy has always exalted the worst sides of people. Not casually, in the Anglophone States/governments, the most efficient or the less inefficient in the last centuries, it is just an empty formality, a cover of something else.

Wherever there were or there are regimes of people’s democracy, they were and are more liberticidal than ‘fascist’ ones. It is a fact... Where is the improvement? ...And with spreading corruption and chronic economic depression, apart from phases of comprador development as the nowadays China which is not anyway an example of communalist or anarchist paradise. Permanent war economies as Soviet Russia and North Korea create open slavery, of course with privileged oligarchies inside as a big concentration camp.  

When Soviet Russia went through its forced industrialization, it was an industrialization for a permanent war economy so with no benefit for the large majority of the Russian people. Finally, this war economy was used for the needs of the British clash against Germany (while Russian interest would have been its integration with the German economy; England pushed it again Germany had to be attacked from Soviet Union on 1, or the first days of, July 1941) and, after WW2, for justifying the US arm race with the large majority of the Russian people going on starving. ...‘Communist’ or ‘socialism’ as indispensable complement of ‘capitalism’...

Sure, with “Tout le pouvoir aux communes!” would be different... They always tell that... Déjà vu!

People are always the same. The fact that they be not in office or power do not make them necessarily better than people in office or power. ‘People democracy’ is a pitiful illusion and it does not solve any problem. On the contrary it is the source of a lot of additional problems. Discussion and voting have never solver anything. They eventually are source of additional complications. These are fact, not preferences of who wrote these comments. Universities teach different things because they are just power agit-prop centres, about these matters. 

Indirectly, this work, this ‘libertarian’ manifesto, witnesses the stupidity of power, specifically of the French State/government. Until they are only literary declarations, there is no reason for any State/government alarm and repressive action. Only an obtuse State/government would use its intelligence and special units for hysterically chasing those who may have written it. It is without any justification making up cases for framing up suspects of these milieus. It is always silly and counterproductive to persecute and trying frame up people.

If this work represents some social problems and jacqueries, the point is the social problem and the jacqueries, alias some social disintegration which is not contrasted by repression. There are always intellectuals appropriating, making as theirs, jacqueries and casseurs having a source absolutely independent from them. This book is an intellectual operation after jacqueries/revolts it may be even triggered in various ways (manipulating criminality, for instance) from power, from State/government, for justifying a more aggressive and hysterical police State. 

This book is the consequence of something happened and of a climate State/government wanted to create. It is not and will not be the cause of anything. If, for demographic and economic reasons, there is some ethnic and social emergence, the reply to that is not State terrorism against lower classes and specific ethnic groups.  

Hollande seems more interested in striking the rich instead of making them to invest money for creating jobs and affluence also for the lower classes. France has a relatively low employment rate. State terrorism and State/government narcotics polices for lobotomizing the youngsters of poor districts do not create jobs nor do create diffused affluence. ‘

At the same time, some hysterical propaganda on ethnic supposed terrorist plots do not seem to solve any problem. On the contrary, it is a propaganda smoke while Secret Police have been charged of inventing terrorism for justifying State terrorism. Repression is something to be done in absolute silence, and only if and when there is something to repress. Hollande do not know how to use State/government so he appears to be used from State/government bureaucracies and other interest centres. They create problems. They offer themselves as the false solution. 


Comité invisible, L'insurrection qui vient, La fabrique éditions, Paris, France, 2007.