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Title: Definition of Terms Author: CrimethInc. Date: November 1, 2001 Language: en Topics: definitions, Harbinger, analysis Source: Retrieved on 7th November 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2001/11/01/definition-of-terms
In a totalitarian regime (whether it be political, like the Stalinist
government of the Soviet Union, or socio-economic, like the corporate
capitalism of our day), in which the whole of human relations is
regulated, fragmentary resistance to any one aspect of that regime —
environmental destruction, police brutality, child abuse, racism,
employee ennui — can only fail. The totality itself must be contested,
the basic paradigms as well as their specific manifestations… not in
order to impose another totalitarian order, but to open new horizons for
everyone.
For this, a resistance is needed which does not standardize those who
participate in it, in which individuals can help each other to break
free in the process of creating and exploring themselves. This sketch of
six oppositions is not meant as a complete map of the world of human
relations, but rather as a selection of tools for the woman or man
engaged in her own analysis.
— Nadia C.
We move in spiral paths, imploding or expanding, relinquishing the world
to become what we hate, or finding the faith to discover new worlds and
loves. Alchemy is the process by which one moves from the vicious inner
circle outwards…
Abundance and scarcity are not just measurements of the resources which
exist to meet one’s needs — they are different ways of regarding both
the resources and the needs themselves… which become reflected in the
world.
Abundant resources exceed the need for them; they may even multiply when
utilized. Most of the things which set life apart from survival — love,
friendship, confidence, imagination, courage, adventure, experience —
are available in abundance: the more you partake of them, the more they
are available to you and everyone else as well.
Scarce resources, on the other hand, exist in limited supply, and there
may simply not be enough to go around. A scarcity economy is driven by
the considerations necessitated by those conditions: in it, the “laws”
of supply and demand are imposed first of all by a shortage, real or
perceived, of needed goods.
It might seem that scarcity is simply an inescapable fact of life, but
it’s not that simple. Not all scarcities are imposed by circumstances —
often, we impose them upon ourselves by the ways we assess and apply our
assets. In our technologically advanced, post-industrial civilization,
tools and amenities which were unheard of before are plentiful, yet most
of us distinctly feel there to be a shortage of the things we need. This
should not be surprising, for our social and economic systems depend on
there not being enough for everybody. Everyone can have a full life —
but not everyone can have a full wallet. Our society institutes scarcity
and deprivation, by framing life as a desperate rush for limited
material wealth and status.
They say the only free men are the hobo and the king. They are indeed
the only ones who can claim to be lords of all they survey — though for
utterly different reasons: the former possesses the entire world by
releasing it, while the latter still owns only what he can conquer. Here
we can see the paradigms of abundance and scarcity in action as
philosophies of life. Likewise, the scavenger who thrives off the excess
of his society sees opportunity and adventure where the executive sees
only hunger and destitution; the non-monogamous lover sees love as
something that only increases in richness and depth by being shared
freely, while the possessive husband regards it as a precarious prize
obtained by sacrifice and hard labor, which must be hoarded and caged;
the would-be rock idol or movie star needs a million anonymous fans
watching his actions to validate them (thus selfhood itself is subject
to scarcity in a spectator society), while the woman in a supportive,
egalitarian community generally attains self-confidence and happiness to
the extent that she helps others around her do the same.
Once upon a time, humans lived in a relationship of trust with the
earth, seeing it as a wellspring of abundance[1]: we ate fruit, which
grew freely around us, naturally wrapped in a biodegradable peel and
containing seeds from which more fruit trees would grow after the fruit
was eaten. Today we eat candy bars, for which we must exchange our
labor, of which supplies are strictly limited — and when we throw away
the wrappers, manufactured from plastics and chemicals foreign to
nature, we can be sure that we are adding to the slow accumulation of
garbage that makes fruit trees more and more scarce. Ancient human
beings lived in conditions of feast or famine, celebrating when their
cups overflowed and whistling through leaner times, never having to
diminish their faith in their resources by measuring them; for us,
everything is a transaction, an occasion for computation and
calculation.
Abundance and scarcity are above all the manifestations of opposing
approaches to life: ingenuity or inertia, faith or fear. If we
restructure our values and assumptions about what the cosmos has to
offer us, we can enter a new world of plenty.
13. The more you can recognize the opportunities of your life, the more
you can take advantage of them.
24. The more you recognize the treasures life has to offer, the more you
have faith in it to offer them.
1. The less you trust the world, the less you recognize what it has to
offer.
12. The less you recognize what the world has to offer, the less you
trust it.
Life is existence when it feels worth waking up for in the morning. Life
is written about in epic poetry, love songs, Shakespeare’s plays and
sonnets; survival is treated in medical textbooks, urban planning
reports, and ergonomics presentations. Life is glorious, heartbreaking,
extravagant. Survival, without life, is ridiculous, burdensome, absurd.
14. The more your life is in your own hands, the more it is an
experience of liberty and pleasure.
19. The more full and free life is, the easier it becomes to recognize
all the opportunities and treasures it has to offer.
Survival is life reduced to imperatives, whether they be biological (get
air to breathe! get food to eat! get laid!) or cultural (get air
conditioning, to be comfortable! get a television, to keep up with
what’s going on! get a sports car, to attract a mate!). It’s often
ambiguous which class a given mandate falls into, as in the case of the
computer programmer who cannot feed himself without a can opener; but
the essential character of these needs is that they appear
non-negotiable.
Survival resources tend to be seen as scarce — there’s only so much
food, water, housing, medicine in the world; but as the famous tramp
once responded to the predictable query of a bourgeois man (“you’ve got
to eat, haven’t you?”): “yeah, but not as often as you eat.”
Our era is characterized by ever-increasing standards of survival. The
minimum “standard of living” to participate in society is always
mounting, and it’s a full time job keeping up: getting the new format
for video-viewing, learning how to use the new computer program,
treating yourself with the new antidepressant… This constant
technological and subsequently cultural acceleration is the consequence
of an economic system based on contention, in which constant innovation
is necessary both to sell new products and to keep up with everyone who
uses them.
All indications suggest that people spend more time working to meet
their “basic needs” today than ever before: prehistoric human beings
spent the greater part of their days in creative leisure, while with all
our labor-saving devices we waste most of our lives earning the money to
pay for them, using them to mow the lawn, waiting in traffic to buy more
batteries for them. And of course, the more time we spend providing for
mere survival, the less time we have to live.
2. The more you think you need to survive, the harder you have to work.
7. The less you live, the less you can recognize what the world has to
offer.
Play is what takes place when all the problems of survival have been
solved and there is energy left over. Play is not constrained by
external demands — the player establishes her own values and meanings in
the course of acting. Play takes place in a condition of freedom —
rather, it is the condition of freedom. In play, the individual
interacts with the forces around her rather than reacting to them,
creates the context for her actions as she acts rather than being shaped
by the situation: it is thus that self-determination is possible. You
can see play today in the collages on teenagers’ walls, in the eccentric
furnishing of squatted buildings, in the break between skirmishes with
the police when the insurgents dance, in the movements of lovers’ bodies
together.
The resources for play are available in abundance. As a general rule,
the more one plays, the more others are enabled and encouraged to play;
true playfulness is infectious. One can’t play at the expense of others
for long — being “free” at such a price ends up taking a lot of work, as
in the case of the “successful” executive, and doesn’t lend itself to
much real, spontaneous play, as the ennui typical of the trust-fund
playboy demonstrates.
It’s ambiguous whether many of the things currently called “play”
actually are: Is it play when a businessman goes golfing with his boss?
When a group of young men play basketball together according to a strict
set of rules, with a struggle for dominance as an ever-present subtext?
How about when a young man comes home from work so exhausted that he
doesn’t have enough energy to do anything besides “play” video games?
Children, on the other hand, come into this world knowing all about play
— at least until they’ve spent a few years cooped up in small rooms with
the television on. We can recapture that lost innocence, for them and
for ourselves, by approaching everything we do as a game rather than a
struggle or responsibility — by creating environments in which we can
run wild. For the best-kept secret of capitalism is that play activities
can also provide for our survival needs: except in extremities, work is
unnecessary.
15. The more pleasure you take in your activities, the more willing you
are to share the fruits.
20. The more you approach life as a game, the more full and free it
becomes.
Work provides for survival, nothing more. It always appears as a
response to necessity, whether it be the need for food and shelter and
life insurance, the establishment of social status, or the obligation of
the Protestant work ethic. Work answers to imperatives; play creates its
own rules.
3. The more you work, the more you feel the need to be compensated for
your sacrifice.
8. The more you work, the less you live.
In stark contrast to exchange trading, gift-giving is its own reward. In
a gift economy, which exists whenever anything is freely shared and no
score is kept, the participants receive more the more they bestow.
Everyone who has shared a real friendship or a morning of incredible
lovemaking knows intuitively that when the option opens, human beings
return to this natural relationship.
This is a challenge to find and share the trust and responsibility it
will take to reinstate this as the basis of all human affairs, as it was
before the cancer of avarice took hold.
My liberation, my delight, my world itself begins where yours begins.
Nobody can command my services because I have, of my own, pledged to
give all — and gratuitously, for that is the only way to give.
16. The more able you are to share freely with others, the more they
share with you, and the more you are thankful for their existence and
open to their beauty.
21. The more freely you give and receive, the more your life can be a
game rather than a struggle.
Liberty ends where economics begins. Get your money’s worth — earn your
keep — there’s no such thing as a free lunch[2]: exchange economics
posits life as a zero-sum sport between bargainers who maneuver to
outbid and outwit each other in order to gain control of more fragments
of the world. Free trade, the free market — these are oxymorons: where
systematized competition is free to bend all humanity to its
prerogatives, ultimately no one is free to focus on anything else.
Exchange-economics thinking presupposes a one-dimensional scale of
value, according to which everything can be appraised: if an avocado
costs a dollar, and a new sports car costs $20,000, then a sports car
must be worth exactly twenty thousand avocados. But such equations are
absurd. Can you calculate the financial value of a friendship, the
exchange rate of a clever joke for a meal tenderly prepared, the
comparative worth of the sound of birds singing in the trees against the
current market value of lumber? Those who would measure such things miss
everything that is beautiful and unrepeatable about them; once one
recognizes this, it becomes clear how pathological such calculations are
in any context. As if one could “deserve” life in all its complexity and
magnanimity in the first place — let alone good or bad fortune, the
moment of stillness at sunrise, the flavor of avocados, the sensation of
riding in a speeding car! This is simply not the way the world works —
anyone who has lived and paid attention knows the best and worst things
life has to offer are things no one could ever earn. To assess the
commercial value of experiences and sensations, let alone trade in the
very lives of the human beings around you with an eye for your own
advantage, is to flatten the world for yourself and everyone you touch.
The machinery of exchange eats quality and shits out quantity, enslaves
process to despicable product, teaches that practical necessities and
moments of joy and spiritual redemption alike must be earned. There is
something of the old Christian theology of guilt and salvation in the
ways those who hold stock in the values of exchange speak of hard work
and entitlement. For these people, anything free is suspect at best —
nothing obtained without sacrifice, without an exchange can be worth
anything — and the act of paying for things, with the compensation they
have received for abdicating their lives, is itself more important than
anything they could buy: it is the way one buys oneself out of the hell
of “valuelessness” to which the tramp and the adventurer are assigned,
not without a little jealous spite. For them, human beings do not
“deserve” happiness, comfort, even existence itself, unless they pay for
it with suffering[3]. It should come as no surprise that many workers
see things this way: if they didn’t, they would have to face the
possibility that they have been wasting their lives.
Likewise, those who would refuse this system of exchange are confronted
with the same accusations of valuelessness by their own bodies, when
they find that they cannot get food to eat or a soft place to sleep
unless they give up some part of themselves for it.
For once some people in a society begin hoarding and trading for their
own benefit, all who interact with them must adopt the same miserliness
and self-interest to survive — and the most ruthless ones inevitably end
with the most power, just as magnanimity and largesse find themselves
disenfranchised. The world now waits for a new generosity which can
defend itself.
4. Force is always present where exchange must be negotiated, where
giving is not practiced for its own sake.
9. The less freely you give and receive, the harder you have to work to
provide for yourself.
Love is secure, fearless, generous. Love does not make demands or judge
according to standards — love celebrates, consecrates the unique, makes
beauty and beautiful. To feel love is to be grateful for the whole of
the past, present, and future, to feel for a moment that there is a
sense to one’s existence. To be in love is not to be deluded or
destitute, but to gain a sixth sense with which to perceive the real
splendor of the universe. To experience love is to be connected directly
to the tragedy of existence — which is not that there is not enough
beauty in this life, but that none of us has the breadth or depth of
self, or the time on this planet, to fully savor the magnificence the
world lavishes upon us.
Love makes war upon any peace which in fact is war systematized and
concealed, for love is a ruthless enemy of senseless conflict and waste.
It is love, of liberty when not of one’s fellow beings, that makes it
possible for us to coexist in pursuit of our own desires rather than
languishing in thrall to that fat old god Discord. Those in love come to
identify each other’s needs with their own, ultimately making no
distinction, and overcoming the self/other dichotomy that is at the root
of Western alienation: thus in love we find a way to surpass ourselves,
to exalt each other and ourselves in the course of living.
Beauty must be defined as what we are, or else the concept itself is our
enemy. Why languish in the shadow of a standard we cannot personify, an
ideal we cannot live?
To see beauty is simply to learn the private language of meaning that is
another’s life: to recognize and relish what is.
17. The more you feel love and gratitude, the more you trust.
22. The more you feel love and gratitude, the more you can give freely.
When you live in fear, the only way to approach the world that makes
sense is with a gun in your hand. Just as the ones who see scarcity
everywhere they look create a world of shortages, those who depend on
force to relate to others create a necessity for it; and those born into
this world of coercion inherit the cycle.
Coercion comes in more subtle forms than rape, “peace-keeping” bombings,
economic sanctions. It comes camouflaged as body image standards (which
even masquerade as “health” standards), psychological pressures that
influence people to repress their desires, laws enforced by public
opinion as well as thugs in uniform. It may be disguised as a seemingly
trivial argument between friends (for anyone who seeks to establish
rank, even in knowledge of trifling things, seeks a lever with which to
exert force on his fellows), or that quiet self-mutilation which lovers
and relatives sometimes use to manipulate each other — the inverse and
identical twin of macho aggression.
Some call this a democracy — did you get to vote on what the billboards
you pass every morning say, what they go on repeating inside your head
all day, the trees they cut down by your house to make room for the new
gas station? How about the preservatives they put in the food you eat,
or the conditions in the factories that produce them? Your wages at
work, or how much money the I.R.S. takes from you? These aren’t just
inevitable “facts of life” — they are the manifestations of conflict as
the system of human relations, every man for himself and force against
us all. The leagues of intimidating red tape and the battering of women,
the biased news coverage and the inhumanity of factory farms, the
jockeying for ascendance between colleagues and countries, all these are
simultaneously expressions of the strife at the heart of our
civilization and weapons which, used by factions fighting for survival
on its terms, perpetuate it.
Living under the reign of coercion strips you of your faith, leaves you
ready to use force on others, to treat them as the world has treated
you. It is well known that the playground bully acts out of feelings of
worthlessness, that the teenage hoodlum is moved to vandalism by
insecurity and neglect; how much self-loathing and desperation must then
be in the hearts of the moguls and power-brokers, whose machinations it
is that keep the global market running? Whether dishwashers or
directors, all who cannot feel safe enough to create and pursue their
own dreams seek compensation in wealth, status, or more overt forms of
power over others.
Thus a mindset develops in which all human relations are seen as a
conflict between mutually exclusive interests. It’s no wonder many
people have a hard time imagining how human beings could live without
the coercion of [what they have been taught to see as] “beneficial”
forces. But competition, combat, struggles of all kinds are barriers to
freedom, for they impose their demands upon all who are subject to them,
distracting and simplifying without quarter. The terror-mongers insist
that hierarchy is necessary to protect us from the violence inherent in
our species — but hierarchy is simply the expression of the violence
intrinsic to this system. The fact that hierarchy can be absent —
between friends, in moments of mass teamwork, in other societies — is
proof that we can live without such violence, too.
Ultimately, any conflict comes down to relations of force — even those
known, up to this point, as revolutions. Our dream is not to win another
war, but to stage a total revolution, a war against the condition of
war, on behalf of those beautiful moments when people can be thankful
for each other’s existence.
5. The more you depend on force, the more you have to fear.
10. The more you depend on force, the less you can give and receive
freely.
One either invests oneself in the present, or the future: either reacts
to existing circumstances and their demands, or acts to change them. You
can spend all your energies surviving according to the terms set by the
market economy, the expectations of parents and peers, the force of your
own inertia — or risk everything to make those considerations obsolete.
Faith is the opposite of superstition. Faith means believing in the
boundless possibilities of the universe — and setting out to explore
them. It means knowing that if you leap off a cliff, you’re bound to
land somewhere. Faith means trusting that the world is wider and richer
than you could possibly see from this point, and therefore not feeling
pressure to plan out the rest of your life from here. Better to sketch a
route to the horizon: from there, you’ll be able to make out new vistas,
and make new plans accordingly. Heaven help the people who make long
term plans today and stick to them, whose lives will never be greater
than what they can imagine right now!
Faith enables you to rely on your intuition when you need to: instead of
being trapped by what you know, you do what you need to do. Faith gives
you power over your fear. Whether you are confronting a police line or
giving birth to a child or a song, faith is indispensable for capital-L
living.
18. The more you trust the world, the more wonderful things you
recognize in it.
23. The more you trust, the more you can feel love and gratitude.
The one who lives in fear moves only to consolidate the present. He is
not capable of free action — he is too busy reacting in advance to
things that haven’t even happened yet. He can only conceive of the
future — any future — as a threat. He trusts nothing to chance, and thus
chance cannot entrust him with more than he already has.
It is fear which lies at the bottom of all violence and struggle. When
one trusts her companions and the world around to provide, if not what
she thinks she needs, at least something equally weird and wonderful,
she too can be gentle and generous. If she feels threatened by them, she
grows defensive and aggressive, strikes out blindly, becomes possessed
by resentment and cruelty. Vengeance becomes her greatest motivation,
more powerful than any other desire: anything to take revenge upon this
world which has made her feel so unwelcome and worthless. Acting on
these impulses, she spreads them to others like a plague. Fear, like
faith, is self-perpetuating — until something breaks the cycle.
Ask yourself — are you living deliberately? Do you approach risk
willfully, or do you deny yourself because of fear? What are you afraid
of? What are you saving yourself for? Do you own your body? Do you own
your experience? Don’t save yourself. Don’t spare yourself. Preservation
of the body or the tender sensibilities is futile — we all die someday.
The question is what happens first.
There are two possible responses to fear. One is to cower. The other is
to follow your fear, to use it as a guide, to track it out past the
limits of the world you know. Some things can’t be written or told. Go
search.
6. The more you fear the world, the less you recognize what it offers
you.
11. The less you trust, the more you depend on force.
[1] Paleolithic man [sic], a hunter/gatherer who understood the value of
sharing and mutual assistance, had nothing, why hoard things when the
whole world is yours? Later, Neolithic man, who toiled in the fields,
sometimes produced a surplus, which he bartered with others, and thus
for him a shift occurred from being in the world to having things, mere
parts of the world. The hunters and gatherers never curbed their
materialistic impulses — but they never made institutions out of them.
Economic Man is a bourgeois construction, the result of ten thousand
years of subjugation: that is to say, etymologically speaking, living
under the yoke.-Finnegan Bell’s Hunters and Gatherers Through the Ages
[2] Editors note — Ha!
[3] We, on the other hand, don’t think much about deserve anymore; we
ask, instead, what would be best for everyone, and leave it at that.
Revenge doesn’t interest us, being, as it is, just another from of
exchange.