Art abstracts from life. Abstraction is deletion. When the first artist painted an aurochs on a cave wall, the first critic saw it and said, “That’s an aurochs!” But it wasn’t an aurochs, it was a painting. It’s been downhill for art criticism ever since. Art, like science, is illumination through elimination. Artists remove in order to improve. In this sense, minimalism is not just another school of art, but its evolving essence, and all of modern art can be seen as a process of progressive self-destruction. Artists often destroy themselves, occasionally each other, but it was left to a relatively unknown German artist, Gustav Metzger, to give this artistic impulse its most succinct articulation when in 1959 h... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Revelation X: The “Bob” Apochryphon: Hidden Teachings and Deuterocanonical Texts of J.R. “Bob” Dobbs.
Translated by The SubGenius Foundation, Inc. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.
According to the last sentence of The Book of the SubGenius (hereafter: BS): “You’ll never have to read another book.”
Not this one, anyway.
The Church of the One Joke just keeps going and going and going ... nowhere. If you loved BS, you’ll like Revelation X, so you might as well reread BS. If you liked BS, RX is a prescription for (as the greatest of ex-SubGenii put it) less of more of the same. And more expensive, too.
The cost of Church membership, as of funeral arrange... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Science is Capital
Revolution can no longer be taken to mean just the destruction of all that is old and conservative, because capital has accomplished this itself. Rather it will appear as a return to something (a revolution in the mathematical sense of the term), a return to community though not in any form that has existed previously. Revolution will make itself felt in the destruction of all that is most “modern” and “progressive” because science is capital.
— Jacques Camatte [1]
Science is a system of knowledge acquisition that is based on empiricism, experimentation, atomization, rationalizing causality, and methodological naturalism and that is aimed at finding the truth. The... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Bob Black is a revolutionary, smirks David Ramsey Steele, “the way Gene Autry was a cowboy” (“The Abolition of Breathing,” Liberty, March 1989). A Marxist turned libertarian, Steele is miffed that to me his forward progress is just walking in circles. Steele’s is the longest harshest review The Abolition of Work and Other Essays has ever received, and while no nit to my discredit is too small to pick,[1] my critique of work is the major target. Steele tries, not merely to refute me, but to make me out to be a gesticulating clown, by turns infantile and wicked (they are probably synonyms for Steele). “I’m joking and serious,” he quotes me in opening, but if I am a sometimes successful joker... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) If patriotism is, as Samuel Johnson said, the last refuge of a scoundrel, scientism is by now the first. It’s the only ideology which, restated in cyberbabble, projects the look-and-feel of futurity even as it conserves attitudes and values essential to keeping things just as they are. Keep on zapping!
The abstract affirmation of “change” is conservative, not progressive. It privileges all change, apparent or real, stylistic or substantive, reactionary or revolutionary. The more things change — the more things that change — the more they stay the same. Faster, faster, Speed Racer! — (but keep going in circles).
For much the same reason the privileging of progress is also conservative. Progre... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Anarchism, n. 1. The doctrine that a stateless society is possible and desirable. Obsolete. 2. Rule by anarchists.
Anarchism, properly understood, has nothing to do with standards and values in a moral sense. Morality is to the mind what the state is to society: an alien and alienating limitation on liberty, and an inversion of ends and means. For anarchists, standards and values are best understood — that is, they are most useful — as approximations, shortcuts, conveniences. They may summarize a certain practical wisdom won by social experience. Then again, they may be the self-serving dictates of authority, or once-useful formulations which, in changed circumstances, no longer serve any anarchist purpose, or any goo... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Groucho Marxism, the theory of comedic revolution is much more than a blueprint for crass struggle: like a red light in a window, it illuminates humanity’s inevitable destiny, the declasse society. G-Marxism is the theory of permanent revelry. (Down boy! There, that’s a good dogma.)
The example of the Marx Brothers themselves shows the unity of Marxist theory and practice (for instance, when Groucho insults somebody while Harpo picks his pocket). Moreover, Marxism is dialectical (isn’t Chico the classic dialect comedian?). Comedians who fail to synthesize theory and practice (to say nothing of those who fail to sin at all) are un-Marxist. Subsequent comedians, failing to grasp that separation is “the discret... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) I fell out with the Church of the SubGenius in 1987. A few years later, one of their bigshots, John Hagen-Brenner, mailed me a bomb and ended up copping a guilty plea in Federal court, and I spread the news far and wide. After a couple years in denial, H-B’s high-school friend Doug Smith/“Ivan Stang” took to the Internet — correctly assuming I wasn’t there to respond — to disparage the “Black Lies.” But though I wasn’t present, I had friends who were, through whose help I not only saw what Stang was saying but posted the following response.
* * *
Greetings. Through the good offices of the Black Legions (we are everywhere) I’ve read Ivan Stang’s defamator... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Design Your Own Utopia. by Chaz Bufe & Doctress Neutopia. Tucson, AZ: see Sharp Press, 2002. 20 PP.
The intellect can betray man more easily than his conscience”
— Paolo Soleri
Chaz Bufe is an anarchist writer widely published by Chaz Bufe. His self-publishing history (as See Sharp Press) is ignominious.
In Listen, Anarchist! (1986) Bufe issued what the Fifth Estate called “a hysterical parody of authoritarian anarchism” — except that it was not a parody. In it he preached a literal Ten Commandments of moral rectitude to anarchists — at the same time that he defended Processed World, a violent crypto-Marxist cult, which conspicuously violated nearly all of his p... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) No one ever made a more important observation in seven words than Randolph Bourne once did: “War is the health of the state” (Resek 1964: 71). War has been the main motor for the extension of state power in Europe for a thousand years (Tilly 1992), and not only in Europe. War enlarges the state and increases its wealth and its powers. It promotes obedience and justifies the repression of dissent, redefined as disloyalty. It relieves social tensions by redirecting them outwards at an enemy state which is, of course, doing exactly the same thing with all the same consequences. From the state’s perspective, there is only one thing wrong with wars: they end.
That wars end is ultimately more important than whether they e... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era
By Jeremy Rifkin
New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995.
Futurists have announced the new post-industrial epoch almost as often as Marxists used to announce the final crisis of capitalism. Admitting as much, Jeremy Rifkin insists that this time, the future is finally here, and here to stay. He may be right.
No original thinker, Rifkin is a lucid concatenator and popularizer of important information, served up for easy digestion. Almost anybody would come away from reading this book knowing more about trends in technology and the organization of work which have already transformed everyday life worldwide and, whatever their ulti... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) “The general level of insight now is more educated, curiosity is wide awake, and judgments are made more quickly than formerly; so the feet of them which shall carry thee out are already at the door” — Hegel[1]
The tale is told of the American tourist abroad who, encountering some natives who didn’t speak his language, assisted their understanding by repeating himself in a louder voice. That is Murray Bookchin’s way with wayward anarchists. In Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm (1995)[2] the ex-Dean laid down for all time what anarchists are to believe and what they are not to believe, but many perversely persist in error. Its very title announces its divisive intent. Two ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Organizational Platform of the Libertarian Communists. By Nestor Makhno, Ida Mett, Pyotr Arshinov, Valevsky & Linsky. Dublin, Ireland: Workers’ Solidarity Movement, 1989.
It attests to the ideological bankruptcy of the organizational anarchists today that they should exhume (not resurrect) a manifesto which was already obsolete when promulgated in 1926. The Organizational Platform enjoys an imperishable permanence: untimely then, untimely now, untimely forever. Intended to persuade, it elicited attacks from almost every prominent anarchist of its time. Intended to organize, it provoked splits. Intended to restate the anarchist alternative to Marxism, it restated the Leninist alternative to anarchism. Intended to make hi... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) ART? An increasingly inadequate substitute for sex.
BLOOD BANK? Is there any other kind?
BOREDOM? Obligatory for sophisticates.
THE BORN-AGAIN? Twice too often.
CIVILIZATION? The biosphere’s skin disease.
CLASS WAR? The war to end all wars.
COUPLES? Monogamy is monotony.
THE CRUCIFIXION? Too little and too late.
CYNICISM? Long since surpassed by events.
DISCO? The bleat goes on.
DISEASE? Very dangerous: a leading cause of doctors.
ELECTIONS? Dumbocracy in action.
FAITH? Is fatal — get thee behind me, God!
THE FAMILY? No nukes!
FEMINISM? Equality with men: a paltry ambition.
FREE TIME? Work the boss doesn’t pay you for.
... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) In 1979, four Australian anarchist and “libertarian socialist” organizations published a tract called You Can’t Blow Up a Social Relationship, presumptuously subtitled “The Anarchist Case Against Terrorism” — as if theirs was the only case against it and there was no case for it. The pamphlet has been reprinted and distributed by North American anarchist groups, usually workerists, and by default appears to enjoy some currency as a credible critique of terrorism canonical for anarchists.
In fact, the pamphlet is rubbish: incoherent, inaccurate, even statist. It makes sense only as an attempt to spruce up anarchism‘s public image. It clutters the question of violence and should be swept, if th... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Dale Pond, Howard Fisher, Richard Knutson, and the North American Freedom Council. The History of American Constitutional or Common Law with Commentary Concerning Equity and Merchant Law. Santa Fe, New Mexico: The Message Company, 1995.
Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man. But will they come when you do call for them?
— Henry IV, Part I (III, i, 53)
Once upon a time, there was a fair land called England.
All the English were free men and most of them were serfs. All the English were self-governing in counties run by sheriffs appointed by kings, the descendants of foreign conquerors. England alone enjoyed the Common Law, handed down from... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Introduction
We’ve all heard the phrase “law and order” — as if they go together. The slogan assumes that law promotes order, and that crime subverts order. “Anarchists believe the phrase law and order is one of the great deceptions of our age.”[1] I’m going to discuss just one of the reasons why this slogan is a lie. One reason is that law itself may create or perpetuate disorder. This is a familiar anarchist theme[2] which I will not go into here. Another reason, which is not familiar, is that often crime promotes order. Crime can be a source of order — especially where the law isn’t — and this is surprisingly common. If crime is ever a source of social order, it can only... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)