Creation Versus Work
The act of creating is to the humanization of nature and life what work is to denaturation and to a programmed death.
An accelerated reading of the obvious now ranks among the banalities a truth which was yesterday put in doubt: economic exploitation has brought humans and their surroundings to the limits of a survival the apogee of which coincides with its fall.
The history of the commodity and the history of the people who produced it is one and the same: it is made by unmaking those who made it.
We have been warned repetitively from century to century, and, if not reassured, at least precautioned, that there are many terrors to fear, terrors which we know to be inherent in a system the mechanisms of which have ... (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 5. UNIVERSAL SELF-MANAGEMENT MEANS THE FREE REBIRTH OF THE CHILD REPRESSED IN EACH OF US
1. The old world’s death-struggle is rooted in our childhood desires.
The economy grabs people’s childhood twice; once in their youth, and later, in what they repress as adults. If the social development of life-desires gradually slowed down towards the end of the paleolithic era, and the expansion of a sexuality creating the historical conditions which would favor it was halted, I cannot avoid the impression that the blockage goes on being reproduced in us from the moment each of us is born. Beyond genetic modification, the primary demands of food and movement have always, and still do, express the child’s search for com... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) 2. Changing Life
The Refusal of Survival
It is significant that the first Manifesto of Surrealism starts out by denouncing that mode of existence which, to distinguish it from passionate and multidimensional life, has been called "survival":
So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life - real life, I mean - that in the end this belief is lost. Man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his lot, has trouble assessing the objects he has been led to use, objects that his nonchalance has brought his way, or that he has earned through his own efforts, almost always through his own efforts, for he has agreed to work, at least he has not refused to try his luck (or what he calls his luck!). At this point he... (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 3. Total Self-Management
1. Total self-management is the form of social organization in which everybody has the right to make the decisions that affect their everyday life, whether individually or collectively in self-managing assemblies.
2. It has appeared in the history of the workers movement each time that the people themselves have tried to make and implement their own decisions without giving up their power to leaders and without allowing themselves to be tied to any ideology.
3. It has been crushed by the combined effect of its own internal weaknesses, hesitancies and confusions, by its isolation, and by the leaders it has made the mistake of creating for itself or of tolerating, leaders who have led it to defea... (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.) Foreword
On the shore where two thousand years of the Christian era have washed up, the rising tide of the commodity has not left standing a single traditional value of the past. By ruining the mass ideologies that had prematurely celebrated the collapse of the religious edifice, this tide — at a time when the State plays God in the conduct of [terrestrial] affairs — can it not ineluctably push towards the annihilation of the remains of a Church whose mysteries were socialized by The Council of the Vatican II?
The indifference that one today feels towards the beliefs governed by rituals performed by the Party or the ecclesiastical bureaucracy awakens, from the inside out, an interest that no longer supports an obsolete worry... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Dedication
To Ella, Maldoror and those who helped this adventure upon its way. “I LIVE ON THE EDGE OF THE UNIVERSE AND I DON’T NEED TO FEEL SECURE.”
“Man walketh in a vain shew, he shews to be a man, and that’s all.”
We seem to live in the State of variety, wherein we are not truly living but only in appearance: in Unity is our life: in one we are, from one divided, we are no longer.
While we perambulate variety, we walk but as so many Ghosts or Shadows in it, that it self being but the Umbrage of the Unity.
The world travels perpetually, and every one is swollen full big with particularity of interest; thus traveling together in pain, and groaning under enmity: laboring to bring forth some one... (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.)