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Title: What we Want Author: Gérard and Didier Date: June, 1995 Language: en Topics: insurgency, analysis Source: Copied from original Notes: Translated from the French by Charlatan Stew, 1995
We would like the human species to live in harmony with nature, of which
it is an integral part. For us, living means neither dominating nor
exploiting nor manipulating. We feel, therefore, that no living being
should be considered or treated as an object, as a commodity.
We don't want to see lives subjugated to institutions, structures and
relations that organize and administer the production and reproduction
of the processes of domination, division and exploitation.
At present, the essence of our lives is reduced to meeting the
obligations and obeying the constraints that torment, weaken and shatter
our awareness and sensitivity to the world. These daily exactions
paralyze the faculties which might permit us to conceive of our lives as
something other than the instruments and materials of a system of
oppression and exploitation.
WHAT WE WANT IS COMMUNITY AND MUTUAL AID
We want to live in a society that really is a society, that is, an
association of individuals. This would be a society where classes no
longer exist, a society without the categories and status distinctions
which grant benefits and privileges to some while others submit to
constraints and restrictions. It would be a society in which relations
between living beings would no longer be based on domination and
submission.
It would be a society without power, without hierarchy and, of course,
without a state.
There would be no rivalry and competition, and, of course, no money.
There would be no wage labor, no unemployment and, obviously, no
capitalism.
It would be a society made up of many and different kinds of
associations, where every person would be able to participate or not
participate according to her or his inclinations and desires.
In order to live together, to partake in activities, to create, to make
decisions and to settle their differences, human beings would come to
understandings and formulate agreements without the need of recourse to
either hierarchies or representative institutions.
When their lives are no longer submitted to the yoke and the illusions
of the "market," whatever people choose to produce and decide to use
will be the fruit of their tastes and preferences. The disappearance of
the ideas of profit, market advantage, and competition will lead
individuals to reflect on the usefulness, goals, means, conditions and
consequences of their actions, both between themselves and with respect
to the rest of nature.
WHAT WE WANT IS WHAT WE CALL ANARCHY
So we are anarchists. But...names mean so little. What matters is that
in the society we would like to see, the individual would be respected
in body and mind.
Given the oppression, exploitation and constraints of the present order,
it is inevitable that resistance, disgust, indignation and revolt will
arise. These forms of rejection of humiliation and suffering must become
the source of dreams, thoughts and reflections whose communication gives
confidence to individuals and provokes acts of disobedience and the
emergence of relationships and associations that foster the abolition of
everything that, for millennia, has reduced humans to marionettes,
functioning as instruments, thrown away when no longer needed.
It is vital to reject this world, so destructive of lives, and to seek
every way to escape it and destroy it. All the attempts to improve or
reform it only highlight, purely and simply, what a fraud it is.
The important thing is to get rid of all the life-crushing machinery,
which, in various forms (institutions, beliefs, customs, rituals...),
mutilate individuals physically and mentally.
It is important to create a society in which lives are no longer
dependent on the mechanisms that produce "dominators" and "dominated,"
"winners" and "losers."