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Title: On Jaime Semprun Author: Cazarabet Date: April 9, 2017 Language: en Topics: Jaime Semprun, interview, Encyclopedie des Nuisances, biography, situationist Source: Retrieved on 11th May 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/jaime-semprun-%E2%80%93-interview-miguel-amor%C3%B3s Notes: Translated in May 2017 from the Spanish original, “Cazarabet conversa con ... Miguel AmorĂłs sobre el libro El abismo se repuebla (Pepitas de Calabaza) de Jaime SemprĂşn”, La LibrerĂa de El Sueño Igualitario, April 28, 2017 [source: http://www.cazarabet.com/conversacon/fichas/fichas1/abismoserepuebla.htm
Cazarabet:[1] As a friend of Jaime’s who shared his views, what impact
do you think the figure of his father, Jorge Semprun, had on him?
Miguel AmorĂłs: Jorge Semprun was his father only in the biological
sense. On the few occasions that Jaime, a non-conformist adolescent,
mentioned him, he accused his progenitor of having been a Stalinist and
therefore of having contributed to the totalitarian work of the
pseudo-communist Soviet regime. His father’s celebrity as a writer and a
friend of politicians seemed vulgar and obscene to Jaime, as it was
founded on a big lie from which he derived a good payoff.
Jaime was precisely the opposite. He soberly and discreetly cultivated
the truth. He never put his qualities up for sale and he did all he
could to distance himself from the monster of publicity; he let it play
its game while ignoring it. He was so capable of concealing himself from
the spectacle that finding a photograph of him in the media today is
“mission impossible”.
Cazarabet: But he did of course further develop the ideas of those at
whose springs he quenched his thirst for years, so to speak.... What was
his background?
Miguel AmorĂłs: Quite early in life he acquired a solid literary
foundation and, especially after the revolt of May ’68, in his
philosophical and political education he took giant strides forward in a
relatively brief span of time. His library contained a complete
inventory of revolution from A to Z. He engaged in a brief flirtation
with experimental filmmaking, and he even directed a couple of
experimental films, which he later ordered to be destroyed.
He was very much influenced by the situationist critique, because it
provided a coherent theoretical basis and historical meaning to the
youthful rebelliousness that was so widespread at the time. It gave him
reasons and oriented his readings. Talent did the rest.
In 1975, after encouragement by Debord, he was capable of writing the
best international defense of the Portuguese Revolution, which took the
form of the text, La Guerra Social en Portugal [The Social War in
Portugal], based exclusively on what he read in the newspapers and the
accounts of a comrade who was in Portugal during the revolution.
His relations with Debord were brief and frustrating. Jaime did not
expect someone like Debord to be capable of using people like pawns on a
chessboard, but in those days Debord was playing at being a strategist.
Cazarabet: A man of rare audacity and, one could say, he was ahead of
his time. You knew him well; what can you tell us about him?
Miguel AmorĂłs: He was more like a man who kept abreast of reality, a man
who was inflexible with respect to his times, to which he had no desire
to accommodate himself. His lucidity arose from his absolute
non-conformism with regard to theoretical matters and a formidable
capacity for synthesis. He was quick to denounce the recuperative
thought fabricated by the ideologists of power from revolutionary
materials in a book that has not been translated into Spanish, Précis de
récupération [Manual of Recuperation].
He never sought spiritual refuge in timeless verities from which one
could issue ex cathedra judgments of the world, or, to put it another
way, he never hid behind an ideology, and therefore he never succumbed
to an epigonic situationism.
Nostalgia did not suit him at all, especially during the 1970s and
1980s, when the possibilities for world revolution that would put an end
to the old world, or at least another wave of that revolution, were not
yet exhausted.
Back then, we were all still optimistic because the situation of
generalized dissatisfaction that characterized the 1960s was still a
factor and because the crisis of national capitalism was generating
revolts everywhere.
He implacably opposed those who, instead of forging a global critique of
class society by way of direct action, reproduced the mystifications of
contemporary life by giving them a modernist look. For that reason
alone, he was surely never a popular author among militants. He was the
last of the revolutionaries in the true style, made on the basis of
profundity, truth, rigor, good sense and dialectics.
What was truly special about Jaime is the fact that he made his
greatness of spirit compatible with a surprising amiability. Unlike
others, such as Debord, for example, Jaime was friendly and welcoming to
those who approached him. His collaborators were also his friends and he
spent most of his time with them. I don’t think he ever really broke off
relations with anyone.
He was the most noble, open-hearted and generous person I have ever
known. And the only one with a charismatic personality that was capable
of productively bringing together a circle of individuals with strong
and divergent personalities, and helping bring their projects to
fruition.
Cazarabet: He addressed the process of the Spanish transition when he
wrote “Manuscrito encontrado en Vitoria” [Manuscript Found in Vitoria]
with you…. At the time, it was published under the name of “Los
Incontrolados”. Tell us what it was like and what it meant for you and
your friends, I assume it was like a minor earthquake, wasn’t it?
Miguel AmorĂłs: We first met in 1975, shortly after I went into exile and
settled in Montreuil, a town on the outskirts of Paris. We kept in touch
with each other and attempted to intervene in the Spanish revolutionary
process with a pamphlet, “La Campaña de España de la Revolución europea”
[The Spanish Campaign of the European Revolution], which was supposed to
be followed by a book to be published by Champ Libre. That book was the
“Manuscript…”, completely re-written and revised by Jaime.
For bad reasons that have already been discussed in the Introduction to
the new edition of the “Manuscript…” published by Pepitas, Debord
prevented its publication and we then decided to publish it in Spain in
the form of a pamphlet. I had in the meantime returned from exile and
the “Manuscript…” was intended to be used as the basis for the formation
of an autonomous group in Spain.
Unlike the Portuguese events, the unsustainable situation of the
declining Franco regime and the impulse of the Spanish workers movement
were publicized in all the European communications media and as a result
it was all the more necessary to publish a strong dose of truth, for
which the “Manuscript…” was an excellent vehicle, in Spain itself. The
text, published in April 1977, did not represent any kind of earthquake,
since the urgent demands of the labor movement and trade unionism of
every variety and type were much more important at the time than the
battle of ideas.
The proletariat did not want to abolish its condition under the
capitalist regime and therefore was perfectly willing to coexist with
every kind of ideology until its self-destruction as a revolutionary
class. The “Manuscript…” was not totally ignored but it did not have any
influence on the course of events, either. It has nonetheless been
reprinted on several occasions, a sign that interest in that missed
opportunity for the Spanish revolution has not entirely disappeared. It
is a text that is still not obsolete.
Cazarabet: With regard to what you said about Jaime being “ahead of his
time” because he was just that and he showed, at least it seems to me,
that in those days it was more difficult to denounce nuclear power than
it is today, although it is just as necessary today as it was then—what
can you tell us about this? And it was a major turning point in his
career, since that was when he wrote La Nucléarisation du monde [The
Nuclearization of the World]. It was an important new beginning.
Miguel AmorĂłs: The proliferation of nuclear power plants as a capitalist
response to the energy crisis of the seventies provoked widespread
opposition that was capable of concentrating much larger masses of
people than those that were mobilized to challenge the continuous
closing of enterprises that could no longer compete in a world market
without customs barriers.
The accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, not far from
New York, in March 1979, revealed that the nuclearization of the
capitalist countries implied a series of measures of population control
which, under the pretext of security, is tending towards the
establishment of a police state.
Capital is no longer content with exploiting the workers and imposing a
way of life upon them that is in conformance with the laws of the
commodity; it can also plan their deaths by way of nuclear terror and
its effects.
The Nuclearizaton of the World was published as an anonymous pamphlet in
1980 by the journal, L’Assommoir. In that book, Jaime repudiated
moralistic criticism by employing an original device, the spurious
defense, or satire disguised as apologetics, in emulation of Swift’s
style in “A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People
From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them
Beneficial to the Publick”.
His collaboration with L’Assommoir made it possible to publish a French
translation of the “Manuscript…” and a text defending the Portuguese
Revolution against the pusillanimous Bordigism of a handful of
ideologists who specialized in denying the evidence of modern
revolutions like May ’68, the Portuguese Revolution and the Spanish
Revolution. This important document, Les syllogismes démoralisateurs,
was never published in a Spanish edition, whereas the foul excretions of
anti-councilist ultra-Leninism found a minuscule, but persistent,
sectarian audience, in the virtual space, of course. Such is the
fascination exercised by abstract extremism on impotent neo-militantism.
The fourth issue of the journal was devoted to the Polish revolt, which
marked the end of the proletarian cycle that began in 1968. The text,
Consideraciones sobre el estado actual de Polonia [Considerations on the
Current State of Poland], dated January 1981, written for the most part
by Jaime, concluded his collaboration with L’Assommoir and to a certain
extent provided the impulse for a qualitative leap with respect to his
critical work, which crystallized with the founding, in the year of
Orwell, of the journal, l’Encyclopédie des nuisances [Encyclopedia of
Nuisances], the most perspicacious of all intransigent publications and
the most intransigent of all perspicacious publications.
Cazarabet: What do you mean by “nuisance”?
Miguel AmorĂłs: It is a key concept in the thought of Jaime and his
circle. The word “nuisance” is a neologism in French that refers to any
factor that molests or harms the common people, and among these factors,
some ideal candidates are pollution, nuclear power, wage labor,
industrial food, consumerism, machismo, experts, leaders, capitalists,
etc., and above all, the supreme nuisance: the State.
With the idea of nuisances, the Encyclopedia denounced the most common
characteristic of the current social organization and the principal
result of modern production.
Cazarabet: He was an environmentalist when it was harder to let the cat
out of the bag, because at that time people still benefitted financially
from the system as it was; although we shouldn’t deceive ourselves,
there will always be a sector where the pork barrel preferentially
rolls, as always….
Miguel Amorós: The word “environmentalist” is often misunderstood; we
use the word to designate both the broad multitude of nature lovers and
the political activists who engage in action in defense of nature.
Jaime was never an environmentalist, nor did he ever refer to
environmentalism in a positive way. Nature is not something distinct
from society. To defend it effectively, you must radically transform
society.
In fact, the environmental movement, from its very inception, only
sought to put a price tag on the destruction of the environment and, at
most, to manage catastrophe, but never to subvert the existing social
framework. Within that framework, however, there is no possible solution
for any problem of real life, beginning with the degradation of nature.
In the market of degradation, the environmentalists are like the trade
union militants in the framework of the labor market; one is an
intermediary interested in the regulation of the contradictions brought
about by the exploitation of the territory; the other is an intermediary
interested in the regulation of the contradictions brought about by the
exploitation of labor. The environmentalists’ existence is bound up with
the commodification of nature, as negotiators concerning the permissible
degree of harm.
The struggle against nuisances can only be victorious as an
anti-economic and anti-state movement, not as a “green” party reconciled
with the economy thanks to the formulas of “sustainable” development.
That was the conclusion of the encyclopedists, particularly in their
“Message to All Those Who Would Rather Abolish Nuisances than Manage
Them”, a pamphlet distributed in 1990.
Cazarabet: But in that work Semprun criticizes the fascination that
people have displayed and expressed for the world of machines that are
responsible for a certain kind of “social order” … is that correct?
Miguel AmorĂłs: Machines promise a liberation that, despite its obvious
falsehood, continues to exercise an enchantment that is growing stronger
as the degeneration of the subjective conditions proceeds. The
Encyclopedia could not ignore this.
We started from a situationist conception of the world, but Jaime’s
genius introduced some decisive changes:
the critique of the idea of progress as a bourgeois legacy;
mistrust of science and technology as tools of domination and as
vehicles of a superstitious reverence for progress;
modern production as the production of nuisances;
and the struggle against nuisances as the basic terrain of the new
historical consciousness.
These points constituted the basis of the anti-industrial critique (on
the peninsula we call it anti-developmentalism), the most pertinent form
of contemporary revolutionary critique.
In particular, the reasoned critique of the role of technology in modern
alienation and slavery was inspired by the voluminous work of Lewis
Mumford (author of The Myth of the Machine) and Jacques Ellul (author of
The Technological Society). And also by Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique
of “instrumental reason”, and Günther Anders’ indispensable exposure of
the “obsolescence” of the human species caused by the disjunction
between technical “advances” and the social inability to assimilate
them.
Cazarabet: We shouldn’t entertain ourselves with machines and their
machinations. What do you think?
Miguel Amorós: It’s not just about machines. Modern science and
technology are above all else ideologies, as well as subsystems of
domination with a totalitarian character.
When they emerge they develop until they completely determine the course
of society, and as a result they also colonize life itself. No one can
escape their influence—everyone is free to consume them or just put up
with them, but no one is immune to their effects, no one is allowed to
disconnect.
Under this slavery, life is subjected to such a degree of simplification
that it can no longer properly be called life. Individuals, as
prostheses of machines, no longer live, they merely function.
Two examples of this negative aspect of technocracy are high-speed
trains and genetic engineering, which merited two collectively-authored
pamphlets entitled, respectively, “A Provisional Statement of Our
Complaints against the Despotism of Speed” (1991), and “Observations on
Genetically Modified Agriculture and the Degradation of the Species”
(1999).
Both aroused the anger of leftist workerists, those frenzied supporters
of the techno-industrial system which they would like to see placed
under the self-management of its victims.
Cazarabet: Then in 1997 this book was published, which is now being
reprinted in a new edition by Pepitas de Calabaza, El Abismo se Repuebla
[original title: L’Abîme se repeuple--The Abyss Repopulates Itself].
What can you tell us about the piano keys that our Jaime Semprun plays
with such somber tones…?
Miguel Amorós: The Editions Encyclopédie des Nuisances (EdN) was at
first an extension of the critical project initiated with the journal,
but the stagnation of the collective labor involved in writing articles
transformed the publishing house into the heir of the original
publication. With the books published by the EdN, the anti-industrial
critique acquired a solid basis and the vacillating position of the
journal as a bridge between the situationist critique and
anti-productivism was superseded.
The Abyss Repopulates Itself constitutes a milestone in the fight
against the false consciousness of our time. Jaime was proceeding
towards a systematic critique of the economic horror, already outlined
in his two previous books, his two previous musical scores. The
“Dialogues on the Consummation of Modern Times”, signed by Jaime, is a
“detournement” of Berthold Brecht’s “Dialogues d’exilés”
(“Flüchtlingsgespräche”—Exiles’ Dialogues), and in this form
reconstructs a conversation in which the various aspects of the collapse
of social consciousness, a sign of the consummation of bourgeois
modernity, are reviewed: today we all have the right to think, but we
have lost the ability to do so. Under these conditions, the useless
knowledge of disaster leads to resignation, and that is why mere
verification is not enough and why we have to attack those who are
responsible for these crimes.
The problem of the weakness of consciousness in an epoch in which the
radical transformation of social relations is so necessary is
particularly obvious in contemporary workers’ protests, which, when they
come to an end, leave no trace. The main features of the decline of the
traditional working class, now incapable of questioning the world of the
commodity, were exposed in the text, “Observations concerning the
Paralysis of December”, a collective work signed by the Encyclopedia.
Cazarabet: He asked, what kind of world are we going to leave to our
children? But he also went further, and asked, what kind of children are
we going to leave to our world? What does he actually mean by this?
Miguel AmorĂłs: It was not Jaime who asked the first question, but the
citizen-environmentalist, who does not want to see that barbarism arises
like a force of nature from the total technologization of life to which
he is totally devoted. The dehumanization caused by this technological
invasion also entails the more disturbing consequence of rearing a
multitude of children-consumers, without any real childhood, but
perfectly adapted to the simplification of life brought about by
machines.
Cazarabet: To what extent is the book a turning point in critical
revolutionary thought?
Miguel AmorĂłs: The reflections contained in The Abyss Repopulates Itself
are grim, and correspond to the darkest moment for rational thought
which is simultaneously the high point of irrationality. The working
class milieu has been destroyed by mass culture; the abstract
universality of the commodity and dramatic advances in the technology of
surveillance are now taken for granted.
Jaime said what no one wanted to hear, that history has been abolished
by power, that there are no environments where revolutionary
consciousness can be rejuvenated, that the vanguard of modernity, or
more accurately, of post-modernity, was in fact the vanguard of
alienation, among whose ranks we find not only the old leftists recycled
into the civil society movement, but also a good part of the
extra-parliamentary spectrum, libertarian and non-libertarian, the part
that is fighting on behalf of an extremist version of the values that
are dissolving the new order.
He spoke of the new forms of barbarism that issue from a life devoted to
the present moment, of the bleak future of the new generations
brutalized by the spectacle, of the use by domination of terrorist
opposition and even of the simple, everyday instruments of its
perpetuation, of the role of the new middle classes as the social base
of politically correct decomposition and, finally, he spoke of the
abyss, of the spaces abandoned by the system, where the desperate masses
turn against everything, and against themselves.
Jaime had the merit of not falling prey to any illusions, and of
depicting the real conditions of our time, when the veracious
reconceptualization of the social question could not be more difficult.
After The Abyss Repopulates Itself, critical thought abandoned the solid
foundation of the old obsolete, useless verities, and embarked upon an
unstable terrain. There cannot be a social revolution without
revolutionary thought, but the historical movement in which the latter
was inscribed can only be reconstituted with great difficulty.
Cazarabet: As a critic of industrial society he would have gotten along
quite well with Ludd?
Miguel AmorĂłs: He said that industry has been waging war on life for
more than two centuries. It is undoubtedly true that he would have felt
just as much at home among the machine wreckers as he would have felt
out of place among the language wreckers, the pseudo-Luddites of liquid
modernity.
Of course, he would have gotten along quite well with GarcĂa Calvo, too.
He rediscovered, in Orwell’s 1984, the term “Newspeak” to describe a
radical linguistic overhaul intended to make a clean break with the
past, a re-elaboration demanded by industrial society and its
technology: “It is the natural language of a world that is becoming
increasingly more artificial”, as Jaime declared in his book, Defense
and Illustration of French Newspeak (2005).
Without our even noticing it, we use a technically inflected language
that hinders the formulation of coherent reasoning, even in the milieu
of protest “lite”; just consider such barbarous terms as
“intersectionality”, “transversality”, “empowerment”, “poly-love”,
“rhizome”, “queer”, etc.
Returning to Ned Ludd, or rather to Captain Swing, Jaime called
attention to a revolt that went largely unnoticed precisely because of
its subversive potential of a new kind: the Algerian revolt of the
“ârchs”, the ancient tribal councils transformed by insurrectional
necessities into popular assemblies. Tradition and novelty, youth and
experience, all converged in the revolt of the Kabyles, conferring a
maximum degree of freedom to resist the police state with unexpected
success. The participants in the assemblies were true Luddites
confronting the state bureaucracy in defense of their traditional ways
of life which, in the end, were too modern to coexist with state power.
The Apology for the Algerian Insurrection, published in 2001, reveals
Jaime’s less intellectual side, his instinct for insurrection that was
already manifested in The Social War in Portugal and in “The Manuscript
Found in Vitoria”.
Cazarabet: What were his views during his last years? What was the
message he was trying to convey?
Miguel AmorĂłs: Jaime died suddenly in August 2010, with his boots on.
Therefore, his views were still evolving. His last book, published in
2008, Catastrophism, Disaster Management and Sustainable Submission,
written in close collaboration with René Riesel, is a continuation of
the work of demolition undertaken in his previous writings, which he
assiduously cited. The book did not mark the end of a cycle, nor did it
put the final touch on any debates, which is why it cannot be considered
as a testament. It is simply a verification of his previous analyses, in
aggravated circumstances: neoliberal capitalism can now be defined as
disaster capitalism.
The book includes, as an appendix, the text of The Ghosts of Theory, a
supplementary critical gem that examines the magical objectivism that
resolves every practical question from the vantage point of the writer’s
desk. There is no theoretical sphere that is immune to contradictions;
no ideological certainty escapes the hammer and Catastrophism is proof
of this.
Without a revolutionary subject that will rectify the situation and
dismantle industrial mass society, the official future that lies in
store for humanity is extinction.
The real catastrophe is not the one that our leaders are announcing, but
the persistent blindness of the oppressed majority, which lacks the will
to act on the causes of its oppression, and basically wants the same
things that are offered by the owners of the world. We must face the
fact that the deterioration of life is not driving the masses to revolt
but to a condition of submissive adaptation. The most absolute
conformism prevails without any effective opposition. Conflicts dissolve
with shocking ease among citizens re-educated in green consumerism and
internet voting. Disaster management underlies the policies of all
States, which are, in their own way, environmentalists. The
catastrophism of official propaganda justifies compulsory submission to
the directives of a now-“sustainable” domination.
To quote a former member of “Socialisme ou barbarie” who died in 1979,
Pierre Souyri:
“Capitalism has entered a stage in which it will be compelled to
introduce a series of new technologies for energy production, mineral
extraction, recycling wastes, etc., transforming part of the natural
elements that are necessary for life into commodities.”
This is the stage of “sustainability”, that is, of the authoritarian
regulation of the world economy based on environmental emergencies.
This analysis sounds familiar because we already read something similar
in The Nuclearization of the World. The wars for oil, minerals or water,
along with all the other geopolitical operations by which zones of
influence are defined, are the consequences of the
bureaucratic-environmentalist reconversion of the capitalist world.
Those who try to oppose the system from within, who are treated so badly
in the book, will accuse Jaime and René of being pessimists, or even
defeatists. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rebels still exist,
the critical imagination resides in those who have not thrown in the
towel, who have not lost their taste for freedom and who fight to live
without constraints:
“In times crushed by the prospect of the worst, possibilities are still
just as open.”
You could say that was his message.
[1] “Cazarabet” is the name of a bookstore in Mas de las Matas, Spain:
/ [Translator’s note].