The End of Judges and the Judged-Guilty
Fear and aggressiveness diminish along with the price society puts on prohibitions and their transgression.
Free trade manages to dismantle the old walls of agrarian structure, and every newly opened breach in the wall brings up new ideas of openness and of freedom.
Archaic societies surrounded their fields, property, cities, and nations with protective and oppressive walls. Commodity modernity is tearing them all down.
The cities have lost their enclosing walls, the borders are being abolished slowly. Have they become the last bloody pages of this commodity-saga?
The war of 1914 and the rekindling of its poorly-extinguished embers in 1940 mark, so far as it seems, the last ubuesque vociferatio... (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 4. INTENSE PLEASURE MEANS AN END TO GUILT AND TO EVERY KIND OF REPRESSIVE SOCIETY
1. Life is the unpardonable crime for which trading business exacts perpetual punishment.
What you restrain you always feel guilty about. How can what you exchange be perfect? How can a society based on the reification of life not find the simple fact of being human flawed? Guilt is to the economic organization of life what an insoluble debt is to the balance of payments.
From our ancient belief in divine punishment we have retained the machinery of suggestibility, and if there has been any progress in intellectual work through the slow erosion of that mythical beyond, which business no longer finds useful, there still remains a last prop from i... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) 6. Now
Today Surrealism is all around us in its co-opted forms – as consumer goods, art works, advertising techniques, alienating images, cult objects, religious paraphernalia and what have you. As much at odds as some of these multifarious forms may seem to be with the spirit of Surrealism, what I have been seeking to.convey is that Surrealism indeed "contained" them all from the beginning, just as Bolshevism was "fated" to generate the Stalinist state. Surrealism's curse was its ideological nature, and it was forever condemned to try and exorcize this curse, even going so far as to replay it on the private and mystical stage of the myth of old, duly exhumed from the depths of history.
Surrealism had the lucidity of its passions,... (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 2. The ABC of Revolution
The object of sabotage and misappropriation, whether practiced by the individual or the group, is the unleashing of a wildcat strike.
Every wildcat strike must develop into a factory occupation.
Every factory occupied must be appropriated and turned promptly to the service of revolutionaries.
By choosing delegates (who are subject to instant recall and mandated to collate decisions and to oversee their implementation) the assembled strikers lay the groundwork for a radical reorganization of society... into a society of universal self-management.
The instant the factory is occupied
1. Every assemblage of strikers should become an assemblage for universal self-management. All... (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.) Bibliographical References
Aegerter, E., Joachim de Flore. L’Evangile eternal, Paris, 1928.
Aeneas Silvius, Piccolomini (Pius II), De hortu et historia Bohemorum, in Omnia Opera, Basle, 1551.
Aland, Kurt, Bibliographie zur Geschicte des Pietismus, Berlin-New York, 1972.
— , Augustin und der Montanismus in Kirchengeschichtliche Entwuerfe, Guetersloh, 1960.
Albert le Grand, Determinatio de novo spiritu; in Haupt (see below).
Alexandrian, Histoire de la philosophie occulte, Paris, 1983.
Alfaric, P., Le probleme de Jesus, Paris, 1965.
Allier, R., “Les freres du libre-esprit,” in Religions et Societes, Paris, 1905.
Alphandery, P., De quelques faits de prophetisme dans l... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Chapter 15. Roles
Stereotypes are the dominant images of a period, the images of the dominant spectacle. The stereotype is the model of the role; the role is a model form of behavior. The repetition of an attitude creates a role; the repetition of a role creates a stereotype. The stereotype is an objective form into which people are integrated by means of the role. Skill in playing and handling roles determines rank in the spectacular hierarchy. The degeneration of the spectacle brings about the proliferation of stereotypes and roles, which by the same token become risible, and converge dangerously upon their negation, i.e., spontaneous actions (1,2). Access to the role occurs by means of identification. The need to identify is more impo... (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.)