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.
