The Humanization of Nature
Exploiting nature has denatured it, while denaturing humanity. The nostalgia for a primitive nature and for its impossible return is the morbid consolation of a society sick with economy. It’s not a question of re-naturalizing people and the earth, but of humanizing them by giving primacy to the living energies they harbor.
The exhaustion of natural resources and of human nature draws a demarcation-line between the men who work at it and succumb to it, a line that defines the one great confrontation to come. While the parties of death dip deeper into the well of fear and draw out the power to reign over the ruins of the spectacular and financial edifice, a unanimous cry is rising from the streets, from t... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Part I
1
Bureaucratic capitalism has found its legitimation in Marx. I am not referring here to orthodox Marxism’s dubious merit of having reinforced the neocapitalist structures whose present reorganization is an implicit homage to Soviet totalitarianism; I am emphasizing the extent to which Marx’s most profound analyzes of alienation have been vulgarized in the most commonplace facts, which, stripped of their magical veil and materialized in each gesture, have become the sole substance, day after day, of the lives of an increasing number of people. In a word, bureaucratic capitalism contains the palpable reality of alienation; it has brought it home to everybody far more successfully than Marx could ever have hoped t... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) 1. NOTHINGNESS OF URBANISM AND NOTHINGNESS OF THE SPECTACLE
Urbanism [1] doesn’t exist; it is only an “ideology” in Marx’s sense of the word. Architecture does really exist, like Coca-Cola: though coated with ideology, it is a real production, falsely satisfying a falsified need. Urbanism is comparable to the advertising about Coca-Cola — pure spectacular ideology. Modern capitalism, which organizes the reduction of all social life to a spectacle, is incapable of presenting any spectacle other than that of our own alienation. Its urbanistic dream is its masterpiece.
2. CITY PLANNING AS CONDITIONING AND FALSE PARTICIPATION
The development of the urban milieu is the capitalist domestication of sp... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) “To deny society, one must attack its language.” – Guy Debord.
The impossible is a closed universe. Nevertheless, we possess the key to it and, as we’ve suspected for millennia, its door opens on a field of infinite possibilities. More than ever, this field belongs to us, to explore and cultivate. The key is neither magic nor symbolic. The ancient Greeks called it “poetry,” from the verb poiein, to construct, to fashion, to create.
Ever since market civilization instaurated the reign of princes and priests – the lamentable remains of whom continue to swarm upon God’s cadaver – the dogma of the innate weakness and deficiency of men and women hasn’t ceased to be taught,... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Chapter 1. INTENSE PLEASURE IMPLIES THE END OF ALL FORMS OF WORK AND OF ALL RESTRAINT
1. The world of the commodity is a world upside-down, which bases itself not upon life but upon the transformation of life into work.
The factory has invaded the territory of everyday life. For years the privileged zone of alienation, factory walls simultaneously bounded the proletariat’s prisons and the bourgeoisie’s liberties. Those who escaped at nightfall briefly revived in the merrymaking of love and alcohol that vitality which labor’s daily constraints had failed to break. Ten hours a day of noise, exhaustion and humiliation were unable entirely to wear them out. It was society’s sinister curse which forced them to match... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) 5. Converting to Mysticism
Reconsecration
No sooner had ascendant bourgeois power, thanks to the arms of criticism and criticism by arms, successfully shattered the unity of the old social and religious myth, than the new rulers felt the urgent need to reinstitute an organization of appearances – a universal representation of the individual freedoms so essential to the conduct of business – that could provide a justification for their function as an exploiting class. The tentacular expansion of the economy-nerve-center of the bourgeoisie just as it would later be of the ruling caste of the socialist State – was not easily reconciled, however, with recourse to a god, to a mysterious unity which the new conditions of s... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Considering that the habitants of Oaxaca have the right to live their lives as they wish, in the city and the region that belong to them.
Considering that they have been victims of a brutal aggression from the police, the military, and the death squads at the pay of a governor and a corrupt government, both which are not recognized by the people anymore.
Considering that the right to live of Oaxaca’s habitants is a legitimate right, and the illegitimacy is in the actions of the forces of occupation and repression.
Considering that the massive and pacific resistance of the people of Oaxaca vindicates their resolution of not yielding to the threats, the fear, and the oppression, and also proves their willingness to ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Chapter 1. The Subsistence Society
Haven’t you ever, just once, felt like turning up late for work or felt like slipping away from work early?
In that case, you have realized that:
Time spent working is time doubly lost because it is time doubly wasted...
as time which might more agreeably be spent making love, or daydreaming, on pleasure or on one’s hobbies: time which one would otherwise be free to spend however one wished;
as time wearing us down physically and nervously.
Time spent working eats up the bulk of one’s life, because it shapes one’s so-called “free” time as well, time spent sleeping, moving about, eating, or on diversions. Thus it makes itself felt in every par... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Challenging the danger posed by the coronavirus is surely absurd. But, on the other hand, isn’t it just as absurd that a disturbance in the habitual course of illnesses has become the object of such intense emotional exploitation and mobilizes the same arrogant incompetence that years ago kicked the cloud from Chernobyl out of France?[1] Certainly, we know the facility with which the specter of the apocalypse comes out of it box to seize upon the latest catastrophe, patch together the imagery of a universal deluge and plunge the plowshare of guilt into the sterile soil of Sodom and Gomorrah.
The divine curse served to help power. At least it did until the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, when the Marquis de Pombal, a friend of Voltai... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) There was a time when the anarchist Albert Libertad, having a premonition of the kafkaesque bureaucracy and the paper dictatorship, invited citizens to burn their ID papers and to become humans again, refusing to let themselves be reduced to a number, duly filed in the statistic state inventories of slaves.
Our beings today seems so impregnated by numbers that define bank payments, wages, social security, unemployment benefits and old age pensions that living without papers seems as impossible and unpractical as the recommendation of Libertad to finish this degrading and controlling labeling of the social livestock.
In this way we are confronted with a double and paradoxical existence : on the one hand, everybody — no ma... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Translator’s Introduction
Raoul Vaneigem, along with Guy Debord, was one of the principal theorists of the Situationist International. Active with the SI from 1961-1970, Vaneigem’s most well known book, The Revolution of Everyday Life, contains the slogans that frequently made it onto the walls of Paris during the May 1968 uprising.
In an era marked by increasing terrorist slaughter via drones and suicide vests, the Fifth Estate offers this original translation of Vaneigem’s reaction to the January 7, 2015 events , when two al-Qaeda trained jihadist gunmen stormed the Paris offices of the French magazine, Charlie Hebdo (or Weekly Charlie), and murdered 12 staff members. They also killed several others that da... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The world changes from the bottom up
The shock of the coronavirus[1] has only carried out the judgment that the totalitarian economy founded on the exploitation of people and nature has announced against itself.
The old world is fainting and collapsing. The new one, dismayed by the heaping up of the ruins, doesn’t dare clear them out. More frightened than resolved, it struggles to find the boldness of the child who learns to walk. As if screaming about the disaster for so long has left the people without a voice.
And yet those who have escaped from the deadly tentacles of the commodity are standing up amid the rubble. They have awoken to the reality of an existence that will no longer be the same. They want to fre... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Papon is free, Menigon is in jail.[1] Papon is responsible for crimes against humanity. Menignon — according to an expression which, though it is no longer in style, has lost none of its pertinence — killed one of “capital’s valets”. There’s nothing true left, in the circumstances, other than the fact that killing a man in order to kill a system is as stupid as it is intolerable.
I’d like it alright, in these times when the world’s States make humanism into their ultima ratio,[2] if on all the streets of the world the words of Sebastien Castellion[3] were plastered: “Killing someone isn’t defending a doctrine; it’s simply killing someone.”
If the blind ang... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) CONVERSATION: The author of Treatise on Living for the Young Generations pursues his quest for happiness.
Lovers of Existence.
In The Knight, the Lady, the Devil and Death, Raoul Vaneigem takes stock in the manner of the navigators. These aren’t his Memoirs. He’s asking the time. What time is it in my own existence? “It is a time in which the years efface themselves,” Vaneigem writes in the Preamble. “They abandon us all the more easily because we have refused to count them. They only leave us in a forest that is both strange and familiar, worrisome and peaceful....”
Born in 1934 in Lessines, Belgium, Raoul Vaneigem was, in his youth, one of the strollers of the big cities who plo... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Chapter 10: Quarrels about Prophets and Apostles: Jochanaan, Theudas/Jude/Thomas, Jacob, Simon-Peter, Barnabas, Saul/Paul
If history hasn’t preserved the least trace of someone named Jesus, on the other hand, his inventors and worshipers — disguised [travestis] in the course of time as brothers, companions, witnesses, disciples or apostles — easily revealed themselves at random to the witnesses of the First Century. So it goes with John the Baptist, Thomas, Jacob the Just, Simon Cephas and Barnabas.
Paradoxically, concerning Paul, the best known, upon whom the biographers spread themselves with the greatest gullibility, there remains nearly nothing that hasn’t been reduced to the authenticity of short notes taken... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Chapter 5. The Decline and Fall of Work
The duty to produce alienates the passion for creation. Productive labor is part and parcel of the technology of law and order. The working day grows shorter as the empire of conditioning extends.
In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create. What spark of humanity, of a possible creativity, can remain alive in a being dragged out of sleep at six every morning, jolted about in suburban trains, deafened by the racket of machinery, bleached and steamed by meaningless sounds and gestures, spun dry by statistical controls, and tossed out at the end of the day into the entrance halls of railway stations, those... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Question: Rapprochement.
At the start of 1961, you sent a text – “Fragments For A Poetics,” which included several poems – to Henri Lefebvre, who passed it on to Guy Debord. That same year, you became a visible member of the S[ituationist] I[nternational]. Can you be explicit about your reasons for your rapprochement with the SI?
Answer: Destiny is not random. From the depths of a provincial town where revolt appeared condemned to impotence because the unusual voices that had tried to be heard there were soon after silenced, how could I not be dazzled by Paris? It was a town where, one would say, a sneeze was enough for the entire world to catch a cold. However, if I had not floundered in everyday bored... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Introduction
Almost everyone has always been excluded from
life and forced to devote the whole of their energy
to survival. Today, the welfare state imposes
the elements of this survival in the
form of technological comforts (cars, frozen foods, Welwyn
Garden City, Shakespeare televised for the
masses).
Moreover, the organization controlling the
material equipment of our everyday lives is such
that what in itself would enable us to construct
them richly, plunges us instead into a luxury of
impoverishment, making alienation even more
intolerable as each element of comfort appears
to be a liberation and turns out to be a servitude.
We are condemned to the slavery of working for
freedom.
To be understood, thi... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Chapter 1: A warning to students of all ages.
The school, the family, the factory, the barracks, and, by proxy, the hospital and the prison, have been the inevitable passages by which commodity society has bent to its profit the destiny of the so-called "human" being.
The government that this society exercises over human nature, which is still in love with the freedom of childhood, puts in their proper places the growth and happiness that precede -- and delay to diverse degrees -- the familial enclosure, the workshop or office, the military institution, the clinic, the houses of the condemned.
Has schooling lost the repulsive character that it had in the 19th and 20th centuries, when it broke spirits and bodies upon the... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) A member of the Situationist International from 1961 to 1970, Raoul Vaneigem is the author of Traité de savoir-viver à l’usage des jeunes générations (Gallimard, 1967),[1] from which the most forceful slogans of May 68 were drawn, and around thirty other books. The most recent to appear is L’État n’est plus rien, soyons tout (Rue des Cascades, 2011).[2]
Siné Mensuel: Can you give a brief definition of the situationists?
Raoul Vaneigem: No. The living is irreducible to definitions. The vitality and radicality of the situationists continues to develop behind the scenes of a spectacle that has every reason to keep quiet and conceal itself. On the other hand, the ideologi... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)