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Title: The Undesirables Author: Anonymous Date: 2001 Language: en Topics: anti-capitalist, anti-civ, insurrectionist, technology
The Undesirables was originally a one-shot paper published in Italian
and French with a Spanish translation planned by the originally
publishers. Its analyses of the changes in the tools and methods of
exploitation and domination that have happened in recent years were
significant, so I translated it into English as a pamphlet. The refusal
of those who wrote these brief pieces to accept the simplistic
non-analysis of those who cry perpetually over “globalization”, their
insistence on recognizing the unity of exploitation throughout the world
— i.e., that the exploited of the so-called first world are not
privileged but simply experiencing a somewhat different intensity of
exploitation — and their insistence on the recognition of the very real
and significant power of the state in the functioning of exploitation
and domination has allowed them to present an analysis that remains
truly revolutionary — a useful tool for those who seek a rupture with
the present social order. Particularly important in light of recent
debates in anarchist circles is the authors’ insistence that a critique
of technology that does not include class analysis is a partial critique
and that class analysis without a critique of technology is equally
insufficient.
I find their analyses of the particular effects of post-industrial
technology quite significant, but feel that they underplay the
importance of social control in the original development of the factory
system itself — the idea of a liberatory use of industrial technology
was always an illusion — so just as the dream of going back to a “nicer”
form of capitalism is delusional, so also is that of going back to a
“nicer” form of industrialism. I suspect the authors of these pieces
would agree, but it is a question that they left unclear.
These texts are tools for discussion and the development of analyses
among those who want to create projects aimed at the destruction of the
present society with its basis in exploitation and domination, those who
dream of lives and relationships built on desires freed from the
domination of the market and the state. In other words, for those who
are beginning to create the new lucid and revolutionary luddism that the
dream of free life demands in this world. W.L.
There are ever increasing numbers of undesirables in the world. There
are too many men and women for whom this society has not provided any
role except that of croaking in order to make everyone else function.
Dead to the world or to themselves: this is the only way society wants
them.
Jobless, they serve to goad anyone who has a job to whatever
humiliations in order to tightly hold on to it. Isolated, they serve to
make those who are recognized as citizens believe they have a real life
in common (between the stamped documents of authority and the market
benches). Immigrants, they serve to give the illusion of having roots to
anyone who — being proletarian with no offspring left at home — is
despised by his own children and left only with her nothingness in the
workplace, in the subway and in front of the television. Undocumented,
they serve to remind us that wage slavery is not the worst thing — there
is forced labor and fear of control that tightens at every patrol.
Expelled, they serve to blackmail all the economic refugees of
capitalist genocide with the fear of a journey toward misery without
return. Prisoners, they serve to threaten all those who no longer want
to resign themselves to this miserable existence with the specter of
punishment. Extradited as enemies of the state, they serve to make it
understood that in the International of power and of exploitation there
is no space for the bad example of revolt.
Poor, isolated, everywhere strangers, prisoners, outlaws, bandits: the
conditions of these undesirables are increasingly common. Thus, the
struggle can make itself common, on the basis of the refusal of a life
that is becoming more precarious and artificial every day. Citizen or
foreigner, innocent or guilty, undocumented or regularized: the
distinctions of state codes don’t pertain to us. Why would solidarity
have to accept these social boundaries when the poor are continually
tossed from one to the other?
Our solidarity is not with the misery, but with the vigor with which men
and women do not put up with it.
Beneath the riverbed where history flows, a dream seems to have
withstood the wear and tear of time and the implacable succession of
generations. Look at the yellow parchment of this renaissance codex;
look at these woodprints on the page that takes us back to the youth of
a millennium that has scarcely ended. See the asses riding the cardinals
and the usual starvelings joyously drowning in food, see the crowns
trampled, see the end of the world — or better still — the world turned
upside-down. Here is the dream then laid bare, the dream that speaks
from an engraving made five hundred years ago: to destroy the world in
order to grasp it, to steal it from god in order to make it ours and at
last shape it with our own hands. The epochs have given it clothes of
ever-changing styles. It was dressed as a peasant during the medieval
insurrections and as a blouson noir during May 1968 in France, as an
Italian worker during the factory occupations and as an English weaver
during the times when the first industrial looms were being destroyed
with hammer blows. The wish to turn the world upside down has resurfaced
every time that the exploited have known how to gather the threads that
tie them together, threads that are broken in every epoch and retied
through different forms of exploitation. Indeed, these forms are what in
some way “organize” the exploited: they are centered at different times
in the factories or in the living quarters, in the urban ghettoes or in
front of the employment office, imposing the confrontation with similar
living conditions and similar problems. Let’s stop a moment to unearth
our deepest memories and summon stories of our fathers. The factory in
the haze or the sweat in the fields burnt by the sun, the torment of a
colonial occupation that robs you of the fruits of the earth or the
increasingly frantic rhythm of a haste that in whatever “communist”
state promises a tomorrow that never comes to liberate you from
exploitation. With each of these images from our past we can associate
the different ways of standing together that the exploited used and,
thus, the concrete bases of the various struggles that have striven to
turn the world upside down and do away with exploitation.
If we read the history of the past thirty years carefully, we can single
out a line of development, a series of modifications that have shaken
the planet up. This new situation is commonly called “globalization”. It
is not a matter of an event that is definitively accomplished, but of
changes that are still in course — with different rhythms and
peculiarities for every single country — and that leave us the space to
advance a few predictions. First, however, let’s immediately avoid a
commonplace about “globalization”. The tendency of capitalism to seek
out markets to conquer and a work force at the lowest cost on a
planetary scale has always been present; it is certainly not an
innovation. The tools for doing this have changed; thanks to the
development of technology, capital can realize this tendency with
rhythms and consequences unthinkable up until a few years ago. Therefore
there is no point of rupture between the old capitalism and the modern
form, nor has there ever been a “good” capitalism developed on a
prevailingly national basis to which we could return — as so many
adversaries of neoliberalism believe. From 1973 — the year that
conventionally marks the beginning of the “information age” — up to now,
capital has not changed its nature in the least; it has not become more
“vicious”. It is simply better armed, more capable of rendering the
planet unrecognizable. For convenience, we will attempt to examine this
process through the processes that have happened in three geographical
areas: the former colonial countries, the countries of eastern Europe
that have barely ceased to be so-called communist regimes and those of
the west.
As is well known, the old colonies did not cut off relations with the
colonizers at all when they gained their independence. Rather, in most
cases, after difficult beginnings, they modernized them. If the primary
aim of the old colonial exploitation was to corner raw materials at low
cost that could then be worked in the west, from a certain time forward
entire stages of production came to be set up in poorer countries,
capitalizing on the extremely low labor costs. So low as to cover the
expenses of transport of the raw materials, machinery and finished
products as well as the costs of financing the local regimes that are
responsible for public order and the regulation of production. For many
years, western capital has invaded these lands, deeply changing their
social fabric. The old peasant structures have been destroyed, community
relations cut off, women proletarianized in order to make space for
industrialization. Just as in Europe in the 19^(th) century, an immense
quantity of labor power that was torn from the land has found itself
wandering the shantytowns in search of work. In spite of its immensity,
this situation was able to achieve a stability of its own for as long as
the manufacturing industries could absorb a consistent part of this
labor power. But at a certain point, these industries began to close one
by one. Something had changed to the north: the western labor force was
competitive with those in the southern part of the world again. So many
industries closed, but these new proletarians remain, so many of no use
to the world economy.
To the east, the situation is no better. The so-called communist regimes
have left a desert behind them. The productive apparati — enormous and
obsolete — have remained as an inheritance to the old local bureaucrats
and to western capital. Thus, the children and grandchildren of those
exploited by the regime — who had to suffer the Sunday sermons about
“cooks in power” and proletarian internationalism — have found
themselves unemployed. As we know, all industrial restructuring requires
dismissal. Just as they did in the former colonies, the western
countries have trimmed back the zones of economic and political
influence in the territories of the deceased Warsaw Pact by transferring
those parts of production which consume the greatest amount of labor
power to them. But it is a drop in the sea and the mass of the poor who
have been made useless to the masters remains enormous. The
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have thought to
accelerate this process in a decisive manner in the east as they did in
the south through the blackmail of debts.
It is this which causes the long march of these unwanted children of
capital, these undesirables, to depart from the south and the east. But
those who remain at home are no better off. The social upheavals
provoked by such great and sudden changes are often channeled into
ethnic and religious discourses — new and increasingly bloody wars are
just around the corner. For those who choose the path of emigration as
well as for those who remain behind, the only certainty is misery and
dispossession. Every regret is vain.
Meanwhile, what has happened in the west? Though less brutal, the
changes have been parallel to those in the rest of the world. The huge
industrial plants — which employed a consistent portion of the poor and
determined the appearance of the city, and thus the mentality and the
way of living and rebelling of the exploited, for many years — have
disappeared, in part because they were transferred into poorer countries
as we have seen, and in part because it has been possible to split them
up and to distribute them differently throughout the territory. Through
the development of technology, the productive processes have not only
been automated, but also rendered more flexible, more amenable to the
intrinsic chaos of the market. At one time, capital had need of
exploited depositories of knowledge and manual skills necessary for
managing a segment of the productive process more or less automatically
— that is to say, it needed the exploited who spent their whole life in
the same factory making the same thing. This is no longer true. The
skills required are increasingly low and interchangeable. There is no
longer an accumulation of knowledge. One job is equal to another. The
old myth of the “regular position” is replaced by the ideology of
flexibility, which is to say, of precariousness and of the erosion of
all guarantees: it is necessary to know how to adapt oneself to
everything, even to weekly contracts, the underground economy or
definitive expulsion from the productive context. These changes are
common to the entire west, but have been so fast and so extreme in some
areas as to render the total cost of labor competitive with that of the
south and east of the world. This is how they have realized, on the one
hand, that return of capital that has destabilized the economies of the
poorer countries — leading to wars and mass migrations — and, on the
other hand, the worsening of the material conditions of life for the
western exploited.
It is clear that, however violent, the change in the west is mitigated
in part by the remains of the old welfare state and, above all, by the
fact that a good part of the western precarious are children of the old
proletarians and therefore benefit indirectly from the old guarantees
through their families. However, the passing of one generation will be
sufficient for making precariousness the most widespread social
condition. Thus we, the children of the industrial world, will find
ourselves to be increasingly useless, in the same position, in fact, as
the crowds of undesirables that landed on our shores. With the passing
of years and the stabilization of this situation all those movements
that try to give support to circumscribed portions of the exploited
(immigrants, unemployed, precarious, etc.) from the outside will lose
meaning. The conditions of exploitation will be similar for all, thus
opening the door to truly common struggles wide. Here at last the thread
is discovered that unites us all, the exploited of a thousand lands,
heirs of such different histories: capital itself has reunited the lost
communities of the human species in misery. The life that is sketched
out for us on the horizon will be lived commonly under the mark of
precariousness. Carefully prepared by the development of exploitation,
here are the modern material bases for the ancient dreams of freedom,
here is the site of the coming revolts.
The upheavals that have rendered the planet so unrecognizable show a
constant: capital follows a two-fold movement. On the one hand, it
dismembers every social tissue that puts up resistance to its expansion;
on the other hand, it reconstructs relations between individuals
according to its requirements. Every economic transformation is always a
social transformation as well, since the way in which men and women are
exploited modifies their way of standing together and therefore of
rebelling. In this sense, profit and social control are two aims of one
project of domination.
After having destroyed past communities and their forms of solidarity,
capital has begun to dismantle the social unity that it created itself
through the industrialization of the masses. This not only in order to
outflank the workers resistance that the factory system unintentionally
“organized”, but also because the capitalists experienced the necessity
of having to resort to a production process in order to make money as a
constriction. The enslavement of science to capital and the consequent
technological transformations have allowed a new economic-social
expansion. Valorization — the transformation of life into commodity —
abolishes time and space to an ever greater extent with the aim of
freeing itself from any fixed material basis. In this sense virtual
reality (so called cyberspace, the global cybernetic web) represents its
ideal condition. Once again the movement is two-fold: if valorization
eliminates hostile relations in the circulation of information capital
and human resources, at the same time it reconstructs social relations
under the sign of the virtual ( through simulacra of human relations and
electronic narcotics). All this presupposes a process that is forming a
“new human” in a position to adapt itself to conditions of increasingly
artificialized life. From the moment in which the economy is extended to
all social relationships, incorporating the entire living process of the
human species, its ultimate utopia could only be the pure circulation of
value that valorizes itself: money that produces money. Correspondingly,
after having extended itself to all social space, the final frontier of
capital, its last territory of conquest, can only be its enemy par
excellence: the human body. Hence, the development of bio-technology and
of genetic engineering. Without going into the merit of particular
aspects of this war on the living here, it is important to underscore
the fundamental role of technology. By technology, we do not mean “the
rational discourse on technique” in a general way, nor each mechanical
extension of human capabilities. Retracing the very history of the use
of the concept, it seems more accurate to define it as the application
of the advanced techniques of industrial production to the mass in the
moment that scientific research based itself upon the military apparatus
(the 1940’s). It’s a question of that process which, beginning with the
nuclear and aeronautics industries and passing through research on
plastic materials, antibiotics and genetics, has arrived at electronics,
informatics and cybernetics. The industrial applications of the most
modern techniques proceed at the same rate as the specialized knowledge
in molecular biology, chemistry, physics, etc and the ideology of
progress by which they are justified. This process that began during
World War 2 is inseparable from the power struggle between states, the
true organizers of industrial society. The development of a knowledge
and technics that are increasingly uncontrollable builds a wall that
grows higher every day between the producer and the object he
manufactures, between the machine and her ability to control it. This
deprives the producer at the same time of all material autonomy and of
the awareness of a possible expropriation (in order to rend the
technical and productive tools from the bosses for their free and
reciprocal use). One finds the source of our precarious and artificial
lives in this double dispossession and not in “neoliberal injustice”. If
capital has diffused itself throughout the entire territory; if the
expropriation of its specialized techniques is impossible (since they
are unusable from a revolutionary, or even just a human, point of view):
if every productive center (the Factory) to which we could oppose a
central organization like a party or union has disappeared with its
historical subject — then nothing remains except the proletarian weapon
par excellence: sabotage. Nothing remains except the anonymous and
generalized attack against the structures of production, information,
control and repression. Only in this way can one stand against the
double movement of capital, obstructing the brutal atomization of
individuals and at the same time impeding the construction of the “new
human” of cybernetics, before the social walls that will have to
accommodate it are realized.
From the time they first opened, a long series of revolts has
characterized life at the temporary holding centers for undocumented
immigrants. Foreigners awaiting expulsion are enclosed in these
structures in inhuman living conditions. It is difficult to speak of
these centers without taking the risk of falling into the pitiful
chatter that is so much in vogue among the aid organizations — more or
less governmental, it matters little — that are so expert in the
utilization of blood, particularly after so many long lists of the dead
killed during these revolts. We are not interested in inviting you to
the commotion or the collective petitions for the closure of these
jails. The death of these foreigners stands along side the murder of
millions of others among the exploited, men and women who are killed by
wars, by work, by the destruction of territory, by prison, or more
quickly by the bullet from a cop’s gun. We no longer believe anyone who
tells us that it’s a question of incidents far away or of bloody abuse:
it is business as usual; all the victims of this global slaughterhouse
can be laid to the account of capital and the state. As opposed to
boorish pietism, to christian aperitifs composed of tears, to those who
would want the immigrants out of the “gulag” as long as they remain
peaceful but in jail if guilty, to those who would want a world more or
less like this one but a bit more “humane”, to those who dream of a less
bloody capitalism or to those who exploit these episodes in order to
enlarge their revolutionary clique — in short, as opposed to anyone who
preaches solidarity in oppression, we prefer to propose complicity in
revolt. No struggle can be separated from any other, because each
manifestation of power is deeply connected to all the others. It is
certainly important to close the detention centers, but to demand it
from the states merely means to push them to find more efficient and
less visible forms of control and repression. Besides understanding
these centers as mere physical structures means to hide all those
arteries that permit their existence: from the Red Cross that co-manages
them to the firms that build them to the contractors for food supplies;
all these are the temporary detention centers; all these are the
murderers as well.
In 1984 by George Orwell, a book that a half a century of
totalitarianism has only confirmed, we find the description of two
completely separate cultures inside the society: that of the
functionaries of the party and that of the proletariat (as those
excluded from the bureaucratic-socialist citadel and its ideology are
described). The functionaries have completely different speech,
attitudes, values and even consciousness from that of the proletariat.
No communication is possible between the two classes. The proletarians
do not revolt against the party simply because they don’t know its
nature or even its concrete localization: one cannot combat something
one does not understand or even know. The functionaries systematically
forget — a selective amnesia that Orwell calls “doublethink” — the lies
on which they base their ideological adherence to power over time and
over human beings. The specialization (rather the parcelization and the
incessant repetition) of the activities is entirely at the service of
the dogmas of the party, which the party presents as the infallible
knowledge of historical and social totality. To accomplish this, it
needs absolute control of the past with the aim of governing the future.
If one changes a few names, one will see that this class division, based
on a clear cultural separation, represents the precise tendency of the
society in which we live. Today the functionaries of the party are the
technobureaucrats of the economic-administrative machine on which the
industrial apparatus, scientific and technological research, and
political, media and military power are based. The Orwellian
proletarians are the exploited lightened — by capital — of those baleful
illusions that were the class programs. Precarious in work as in
everything else, they are dispossessed of that which is increasingly
necessary to the functioning of the social machine: technological
knowledge. Thus they are forced into a new misery, that of one who no
longer desires a wealth she does not even understand. Technological
separation: here is the new Great Wall of China that the exploiters have
built in the name of the struggle against the Enemy (pretending that
there is an enemy from far away, when on the contrary its aim is the
management of work.)
Today the citadel of the party is telematic technology; its Ministry of
Truth is the mass media; its dogmas, eternal for the space of one night,
all have the sweet ring of uncertainty. From the multinationals to the
banking system, from the nuclear industry to the military, the bases of
the technobureaucracy are two: energy and information. Whoever controls
these controls time and space.
Outside of the masses of technical workers without qualification, there
are the possessors of highly specialized knowledge whose numbers
decrease daily; but we all share in the consequences of this knowledge —
first among them, the impoverishment of ideas and logic. In spite of
this, the aim of the technobureaucrats and their journalists is actually
to make us feel responsible for the disaster that they produce daily:
the we that they apply to us without reprieve is an order to unity in
abjectness. They invite us to discuss every fictitious problem, they
grant us the right to express ourselves, after having deprived us of the
means of doing so. Therefore every ideology of democratic participation
(combating “exclusion” is the program of the left of capital) is only
complicity in the disaster. Just like in 1984, today’s proletarians have
a knowledge, memory and language separate from that of the party; it is
only on the basis of this separation that they have the right and the
duty to participate in the social order. The difference is that in
Orwell the non-functionaries are the only one’s to have access to a past
— places, objects, songs — not yet obliterated. And this because they
still have social bonds, even if in the shadow of the bombs. But what
remains when the party (that is the state-capitalist system)
appropriates all of social life?
That is why in these pages on the undesirables, technology is talked
about at the same time. A critique of technological progress that
abandons the discussion of class seems to us to be just as partial as a
critique of precariousness that does not confront the new forms and
territories of techno-scientific dispossession.
The division into two worlds that is developing could preclude all
feeling for revolt: how can one desire an other life when every trace of
it has disappeared?
There are already many among the radical democrats and the “people of
the left” who attribute a purely decorative role to the state in the
decisions made over our skins. In substance, a world hierarchy is
outlined that sees the great financial and multinational powers at the
peak and on the lower steps the individual national states that
increasingly become mere aides, executors of final decisions. This leads
to an illusion that is having the worst consequences. Indeed, many are
trying to impose a reformist and, in some ways, nostalgic direction on
the struggles that are developing throughout the planet against specific
aspects of “globalization”: the defense of “good” old national
capitalism and, correspondingly, the defense of the old model of state
intervention in the economy. However, nobody notices that that the
ultra-liberal theory so much in fashion in these times and the Keynesian
model in fashion until a few years ago simply propose two different ways
of organizing exploitation.
Of course, it cannot be denied that the actual state of things all of
our lives is determined as a function of “global” economic necessity,
but this does not mean that politics has ceased to be harmful. To think
of the state as already being a fictitious entity or exclusively as the
regulator of exploitation and of social conflicts is at least limited.
It is a capitalist among capitalists, and among these it fulfills vital
functions for all the others. Nonetheless, its bureaucracy, bound but
not subordinated to the cadres of enterprise, aims above all to
reproduce its own power. The state, in preparing the terrain for
capital, develops its own at the same time. The progressive demolition
of the barriers of time and space — the essential condition for the new
form of capitalist domination — is prearranged by state structures that
place territories, funds and research at its disposal. The possibility
of making merchandise travel increasingly quickly, for example, comes
from the development of networks of highways, the High Speed Railroad,
the system of ports and airports: without these structures, organized by
the state, “globalization” would not even be thinkable. Similarly,
information networks are nothing other than a new utilization of old
telephone cables: every innovation in this sector (communications via
satellite, fiber optics, etc.) is taken care of once again by state
structures. This is how the other fundamental necessity of the
globalized economy is satisfied, the possibility of making data and
capital travel in tiny instants. In the realm of research, of the
continuous modernization of technology, the state plays a central role
as well. From the nuclear to the cybernetic, from the study of new
materials to genetic engineering, from electronics to
telecommunications, the development of technical power is bound to the
merger of the industrial and scientific apparatus with that of the
military.
As we all know, from time to time capital needs to restructure itself,
which is to say to change the systems, the rhythms, the qualifications
and therefore the relations among workers. Often these changes are so
extreme (dismissal in mass, infernal rhythms, drastic reductions in
guarantees) as to put social stability in crisis and to require forced
interventions of a political sort. Not only are the rages against
fictitious enemies (those of “different” religions or ethnicities for
example) managed in this way, but the economy succeeds in revitalizing
itself: the militarization of labor, the orders for arms and the
lowering of wages cause the remainder of the old industrial system to
yield the maximum, while the generalized destruction makes room for a
modern productive apparatus and for foreign investments. For the
undesirables — the restless and superfluous exploited — the social
intervention of the state becomes more efficient: extermination.
One of the characteristics of our time is the increasingly massive
migratory flow toward the western metropolises — briefly, the
alternations between care taking and closing borders do not have their
basis in the alleged benevolence of any government but in the attempt to
manage a situation that is increasingly unmanageable while at the same
time drawing profit from it. On the one hand it is not possible to
hermetically seal the frontier. On the other, a small percentage of
immigrants is useful — particularly if they are undocumented and
therefore blackmailable — because it represents a good reservoir of
cheap labor. But mass lack of documentation creates social turbulence
that is barely controllable. The government must navigate between these
necessities; the smooth functioning of the economy depends on it.
Thus, as the world market unifies the conditions of exploitation without
eliminating competition among capitalists, in the same way a multi-state
power exists that coordinates the projects of domination without
canceling political and military competition between particular
governments. Financial and economic agreements, laws on the flexibility
of labor, the role of the unions, coordination of the military and the
police, the ecological management of pollution, the repression of
dissent — all this is determined at the international level. The
execution of these decisions nevertheless belongs to each government,
which has to make itself capable of the task. The body of this hydra is
the technobureaucratic structure. The requirements of the market are not
only combined with those of social control, but use the same “networks”.
For example, banking, insurance, medical and police systems continually
exchange their data. The omnipresence of magnetic threads brings about a
generalized record of tastes, purchases, movements, habits. Everything
under the eyes of increasingly widespread telecameras and among cellular
phones that mimic the virtual and recorded version of human
communication that is not there. Neoliberalism or not, the intervention
of the state on the territory and in our lives is increasingly
far-reaching without being separated from the structures of production,
distribution and reproduction of capital.
In fact, the alleged hierarchy between the power of the multi-nationals
and that of the state does not exist, because they are equally part of
the single, inorganic power that is waging war on the autonomy of human
beings and of life on earth.
The history of modern capitalism opened with a vast insurrection of
workers and craftspeople who refused to manufacture shoddy goods and to
have no control over the machines and production. It was 1811 in
England, and the insurgents were called luddites. Their spontaneous and
informal organization, which developed throughout the city and the
countryside, extended to all workers without distinction by trade. They
passed into history for destroying industrial machinery by beating them
with sledgehammers and for the powerful conspiracy of a population that
the police could not force to snitch. The “criminals” were everywhere
and nowhere thanks to the complicity of unknowns. The army was not
sufficient for reestablishing order: some of the rebels required the
control of the unions and the blackmail of elections, others required
the gallows. The machines destroyed their communities; they destroyed
the machines. They wanted to decide for themselves how they would relate
together. They were proud of their hands which had not yet been reduced
to prostheses of capital.
In this harmful and moribund time, technology not only forces emigration
and precariousness, poisons the food and air and connects the masters,
their knowledge and their police; it also serves to control the poor, to
standardize behavior and to repress revolt as well. Today, like
yesterday, it is the center of capitalist dispossession; it reduces
human ability and increases competition, uproots the poor and isolates
them, spies on the restless, terrorizes the undocumented and denounces
the outlaw. The integration it imposes is in reality an accumulation of
ghettoes.
The time has come again to attack the thousand nodes of our misery and
our submission — new hammer blows for a luddism that is even more lucid
and radical. Brothers and sisters, the time has come for a new anonymous
and seditious solidarity without leaders or mediators. The time has come
for a new conspiracy.