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Title: Excluded and Included Author: Alfredo M. Bonanno Language: en Topics: class struggle Source: https://www.edizionianarchismo.net/library/alfredo-m-bonanno-anarchismo-insurrezionalista Notes: Translated by some anarchists.
The end of ideology has almost arrived, but not quite.
No political apparatus will ever be able to do without it completely.
The substantial transformation in the productive structure of capital
that has come about all over the world over the past ten years, has
emptied nearly all the existing ideological coverings of their meaning.
Having said that, one cannot maintain that politics, intended as the
managerial and repressive action of the State, has suddenly got closer
to people’s needs. New ghosts have turned up on the heels of the old,
with characteristics that are not always easy to distinguish, it being a
question of ideological coverings that are still in formation. We can
only say that their objective is still that of exerting pressure on
irrational feelings and instincts so as to solicit behaviour favorable
to maintaining the order imposed by the class in power.
Among the most immediate movements that jump to the our attention is the
old mirage of freedom, embalmed in all the logical trappings of the old
liberal-ism and hastily dusted to justify the sinister operations of
managing the new markets of the East. All liberalism bases itself on a
precise discrimination between two categories of person: one who can
enjoy human and political rights and also more concrete one of life
itself, and those who have a reduced form of such rights, which are
always susceptible to possible suspension or suppression.
It is not necessary to remember here that that paladin of political
freedom, Locke, owed his private fortune to investment in English
companies that worked in the slave trade for almost a century. The
English revolution itself, which the idea of political liberalism came
from, had considered the victory over Spain to be a great conquest, in
that with the peace treaty of Utrecht it had obtained the destruction of
the Spanish monopoly of the slave trade, so began this activity itself
on a vast scale.
In reality, if we look closely we see that the new ideological mantel
that is about to be thrown over hastily, by the academic organisations
that occupy them-selves with such things, consists of grafting the old
liberal hypocrisy on to the social body that seems more disintegrated
today than ever before. Only one thing remains beyond all doubt from
this old chatter: men are only equal in principle, whereas in practice
they are divided into two categories, those who have rights and those
who do not. By right one means the possibility access to sources of
wealth, to determining change aimed at reducing the difference in the
distribution of revenue, in other words, everything that allows one to
put one’s hope in a better future, or at least one that is less
difficult than the present.
Whether we will be able to see a reduction in the power of States or
not, in reality these new political movements are moving at world level
towards a phase of managerial opening that might be defined as the
possible participation of the inferior strata in the living conditions
of the superior, remains to be seen. On the other hand the ideological
effect of this perspective is underway, contributing to creating the
better conditions for the structuring of the world in an industrial
perspective.
The essential point of this process is that only some, and quite a
restricted part, of the producers will be able to reach human conditions
of life, meaning by human conditions a greater correspondence between
occasions offered by the State and capitalism as a whole, and the
possibility to exploit them. The rest, the great majority, will have to
find room in separation, in that “dirty” work that the old liberals such
as Mandeville compared to that of the slaves. Not “dirty” in the sense
of the old physical brutalization, but “dirty” in the true sense of the
word, in that it dirties intelligence, defiling it, lowering it,
reducing it to the level of ma-chines, alienating the most
characteristic quality of man, unpredictability.
In this context, where ideological modernisation is walking hand in hand
with profound transformations in the structures of production, a
coordinated system of real and imaginary processes all based
synchronically on flexibility, adapt-ability based on democratic
assembly discussion, and the critical refusal of an authority that is no
longer concerned with efficiency, the old function of the State as
centralizing element of management and repression, is destined to
weaken.
And this weakening is in the order of things, in the spirit of the
times, if you like.
But here we need to ask ourselves, is this weakening a positive thing?
The reply, at least for anarchists, should be yes. And so it would have
been had it not run into, in very recent times, problems that it seems
useful to us to point out here.
Let us start with the positive aspects. Any reduction in the power of
States is something positive that allows greater spaces of freedom, more
consistent de-fence movements, an expectation of better times, survival
if you like, but also organizational forms of struggle that the great
repressive colossi destroy with ease. To participate in struggles that
break up States is therefore a positive move, and in this sphere
national liberation struggles have, unfortunately not always been
occasions for breaking into the monolithicity of power and proposing
possible lines of social divergence, alternatives capable of
demonstrating practically different roads to take. That has often all
been swept away by the sudden arrival of more consistent movements,
capitalist restructuring in the first place, imperialist upsetting in
the repartition of power at the world level, mechanisms in unequal
development, etc.
In the present state of affairs, other considerations add themselves to
the preceding ones. Not that these make us consider negatively national
liberation struggles and all movements that in some way or another aim
to disgregate the centralized states of the past, but they are still
considerations that put the problem on another framework, more
appropriate for the times in which we live.
First of all we must consider the international fluxes that balance
different repressive and productive structures of individual states
within agreements that imply unions more or less intimate, more or less
hybrid, but sufficient to grant that data flow on which every control
structure is ultimately based. These sovrastructures will expand in the
next years until they will rebuild divisions in the world that we have
already seen. These new divisions will have different ideological
packaging, but they'll have the function of restoring the old state
power for the present decaying forms. One could imagine, justifiably,
that the development of nationalism as an ideological element to connect
disgregative processes, is a not-that-stupid instrument used to allow
otherwise impossible structural adjustments. There is no doubt that the
global productive structure today doesn't tolerate the presence of big
centralised states, which are too clumsy in their relationship with
capital which instead gains more and more capacity to speed up
productive processes.
Second of all, we must consider the need to adapt the democratic tool of
obtaining consensus to the new productive conditions. If the latter
produce a dequalified individual, made unstable by precarious wages not
only in his ability to work but also for his psychic composition, meant
in its broadest definition, if this individual (as an element of
society, family, job sector, of his entertainment environment) is
constantly kept in conditions of instability, he can't then be forced to
deal with a monolithic state bureaucracy which today appears obsolete.
As the individual, through schooling, is denied access to the tools of
cultural qualification that should have transformed him from a subject
into a citizen of a democratic state, the state apparatus democratizes,
calling the subject – because such remains the so called citizen of
constitutional rights and freedoms – to maximum collaboration. It
wouldn't have been possible to have a democratic restructuring of modern
states without a qualitative flattening of single individuals, without
breaking traditional organizational forms of the proletariat and,
mostly, without the annihilation of that class unity that in the past
had often manifested itself in movements, if not revolutionary, capable
of stopping and disturbing capital accumulation.
Finally, we need to consider that these disgregative movements act on
two levels, of which only the second one seems interesting from the
revolutionary point of view. The first of these levels is the official
one, promoted by the middle class of more advanced countries, with the
aim to rebuild the old monolithic structures of states on more
acceptable bases, in the interest of the new productive processes of
capital. These bases seem disgregated compared to the previous
administrations, because they have to be ideologically more conscious.
This official movement of disgregation of states has deep roots,
starting from the regionalist thesis that the key to a more efficient
state system is a decentralised administration. The substantial failure
of regionalism, in states such as Italy (a good example in this field),
must not give us illusions of a change of trajectory. The dominant
classes need to give illusory participation to dominated classes in the
administration of public matters. It's an ancient need, but in the last
decades it has become not only a shamelessly violated facade, but a
necessary reality. Italian leghismo [movement of the far right
secessionist party Lega Nord], a phenomenon that has gained interest not
only in Italy, must be tied back to this tendency of disgregation of old
monolithic states, and can be considered heir and extreme
rationalization of the old regionalism. The transition between these two
management methods of public affairs isn't smooth, there is a fracture,
maybe not an important one for whom considers states always as an enemy
to destroy, but important for whom tries to understand the composition
of the enemy to find its weak spots: this fracture is in the ideological
insertion based on the simple fact that the upper classes of
economically richer regions would benefit in having their own smaller
state to manage. This ideological insertion has proven to be necessary
to get people involved on an emotional level, unloading the frustrations
of the masses, who are distant from the interests of the upper classes,
on the classic symbols of diversity: the black, the jew, the immigrant,
the thief, the violent, or manufacturing nationalist myths that appear
ridiculous, which in the general lack of critical thinking isn't
negative and helps connect the masses.
This level of disgregation is manifesting itself on a European scale and
could tomorrow have a global scale, and it is controlled by upper
classes interested in building their own privileged areas, possible
castles to barricade in to administer their privileged condition of
being part of the included, keeping the excluded at a distance and
managing them through the tool of ignorance. The disgregation of the
soviet empire caused the push towards this shift, in particular in
regions where ethic specificities hadn't been deleted by forty years of
forced community. This specificity almost always had to carry the weight
of developing and adapting the ideological element to the conditions of
ongoing class conflict, to the point of reaching the extreme brutality
that we can see in ex-Yugoslavia. Even in different situations in
different states, there is a clear tendency that can be summed up in the
hypothesis of piloted disgregation, or in the slow transition to another
type of administration of public affairs.
The recipe for this transition is complex and has an administrative
element and an ideological one. These two elements generate and support
each other, without precluding the possibility for repression or a
temporary use of power that could be seen as a return to the old ways.
Political pragmatism doesn't retreat for such small matters.
But there is the other level of disgregation, the one that enters
people's heads and acts on an individual level, and that the state can't
avoid because it's forced to manage the disgregation itself and can't
propose behavior models and values from the past. The only way it can
oppose this lack of a sense of state is through cultural segregation,
much more rigid and effective than the physical one we are used to
seeing in the past. An apartheid without precedent, unsurmountable
because it's based on a lack of desire, because you can't desire what
you don't know.
But for now this disgregation is ongoing and parallel to the
disappearance of ideological glue, positive for eastern countries and
negative for the western block, so called anticommunist. The function
that proletarian internationalism had in USSR or China was to be a
counterweight to the fear of communism fed by western capitalist
interest. Once all this disappeared, big illusions where substituted by
smaller ones, small scale ghosts that in some cases where put to
practice, such as the different nationalisms acting in europe, in other
cases they are still to show themselves.
It's important to reflect on the internal elements of this disgregative
erosion of states from below, which is happening not only in states with
advanced capitalism. Let's begin with the twilight of the idea of
progress. This idea, originated in the enlightenment, according to
liberals should have founded the constitutional state first, then the
democratic state, allowing everyone to contribute to the improvement of
public matters. But the illusions of progress, to use the title of a
famous book by Georges Sorel, served to feed the hopes of improvement,
both short term reformist ones and long term revolutionary ones.
Together in the same fantasy, revolutionaries and reformist politicians
shared the waiting for a better future, guaranteed by the objective
trajectory of history. This idea, distant from being an empty exercise
for loafers, ignited dreams of future universal abundance in millions of
men, mixing together utopia and managerial pragmatism. All this has
ended, and it added piece by piece to the ongoing disgregation.
In this aspect, marxist and liberal ideologies are the same. They both
promised abundance and work for everybody, widespread commodities, even
if diversified, and exponential economic growth. It was then found out
that demand couldn't sustain itself to infinity and consumers had to
split in two sides, one with access to commodities and one with
progressive reduction of needs all the way down to survival. On a global
scale this is perfectly evident in the conditions of underdeveloped
countries, where people die of hunger, disease, medieval plagues, all
contrasted with the privileged lifestyle of the dominant class. These
contrasts aren't only far away in space, delimited by deserts or swamps,
but they're right next to each other in large cities, which is perhaps
the most obvious proof of the failure of progressive ideology.
In the constant evolution of social conditions in the last few years
there was an acceleration of processes that can now be considered as
real changes.
The structure of domination changed from a clear relationship of
arbitrary power, to a relationship based on adjustment and compromise.
This was followed by an increase of the demand of services compared to
the demand of traditional goods (such as durable commodities). This
caused the acceleration of productive aspects founded on computer
science and the automation of productive sectors resulting in the
prevalence of the tertiary sector (trade, tourism, transportation,
credit, insurance, public administration, etc.) on others (manufacturing
and agriculture).
This doesn't mean that manufacturing lost substance or meaning, but that
it will employ a decreasing percentage of workers while maintaining or
increasing previous production standards. The same goes for agriculture
that will have a powerful acceleration in the processes of productive
industrialization and therefore will be distinguished from the
manufacturing sector only on the statistical, not social, point of view.
In essence the situation will be that of a transition, not abrupt and
clear, but as a tendency. There is no separation between the industrial
period and the post-industrial period. We're in the phase of going
beyond obsolete productive structures that are restructuring, but not
yet in the phase of complete shutting down of factories and computerised
production.
There is already a dominating tendency towards disgregation of
productive units and towards incentivizing small independent nuclei that
embody the logic of self-exploitation within the centralized industrial
project; but it will keep being accompanied by slow adjustments within
the traditional manufacturing sector.
This discussion is much more relevant for a country such as Italy which
is more backwards compared to the japanese or american model.
Ripped out of the factories, in a slow and irreversible process,
yesterday's workers are projected in a highly competitive environment
that tries to increase their productive capacity, the only acceptable
commodity in the computerized logic of productive centers.
Pulverized capitalist conflict is deadly in it's ability to turn off the
other conflict, the revolutionary one, which aims to make class
contradictions un-cooptable.
The major gains of the inhabitants of "productive islands", their
apparent larger "freedom", their possibility to self-determine work
hours, the qualitative change (within the logic of market competition
guided by the centers that give directives), all this convinces people
that they have arrived at the promised land: the kingdom of happiness
and well-being. Higher gains and exacerbated "creativity".
These islands of death will surround themselves in ideological barriers
and practices aimed to, at first, push everyone who's outside of it back
in the sea of impossible survival. So the problem that presents itself
is the one concerning the excluded.
First the ones who will be at the margins. Expelled from the productive
process, penalized by their incapacity to enter the new competitive
logic of capital, often unwilling to settle for the minimum level of
survival granted by state subsidies that are more and more seen as ruins
of the past in a productive situation that tends to highlight the
virtues of the "self-made man". They won't just be the groups ethnically
condemned to this social role, but, with the new social change we're
talking about, they'll also be the social groups previously involved in
sleep inducing wage labor, now sent in an environment of fast and
radical change.
Even the residual subsidies that they will be able to get
(pre-retirement, unemployment checks, etc.) won't be enough to accept a
situation more and more discriminating, even in qualitative terms. Let's
not forget that the level of consumption of this stripe of the excluded
isn't anywhere near to that of ethnic groups that were never integrated
in wage labor. This will certainly bring explosions of "social unrest"
of a different kind and the job of the revolutionary will be to connect
it to the more elementary push for rebellion.
Then there are the included, those who will suffocate in the "islands"
of privilege. Here the discussion that risks becoming more complex is
essentialised only if we're willing to give credit to man and his real
need for freedom. Almost certainly it will be those "returning back"
from this sector who will be the most ruthless executors of the logic of
attack against capital in its new configuration. We're going towards a
time of bloody clashes and harsh repression. Social peace, dreamed on
one hand and feared on the other, remains the most inaccessible myth of
that utopia of capital that thought itself heir to the "peaceful" logic
of liberalism, that swept away the little dust in the living room and
massacred in the kitchen, that provided social security in the homeland
and murdered in the colonies.
The new opportunities of small, miserable, obscene daily freedoms will
be paid by a deep, cruel and systemic discrimination towards very large
social strata. This will mean eventually, within those same privileged
strata, the growth of a conscience of the exploitation that will
inevitably cause rebellions, even if limited to few individuals, even if
limited to the best.
We must add finally that the new capitalist perspective lacks a strong
ideological support unlike the way it was in the past, capable of giving
support to the exploited, especially in the middle class. For large
groups of individuals who in a more or less recent past directly
experienced or simply read about liberatory utopias, revolutionary
dreams and attempts (though limited and unhappy) of insurrectionary
projects, well-being for the sake of itself is far too little.
These last won't be late in reaching the first. Not all the included
will live happily the artificial happiness of capital. Many of them will
realize that the misery of a part of society poisons the well-being of
the remaining part and makes freedom a prison with barbed wire. In the
last years the industrial project has taken some changes of trajectory,
after the introduction of state control and methods tied to the
political interests of managing public opinion.
Seeing things from the technical side allows you to observe how the
productive organization is transforming. The activity that takes place
in a precise location, for example the factory, is not important anymore
but there is growth in the long distance distribution in the territory.
This is allowing the development of industrial projects with a better
and more balanced distribution of productive units in the territory,
deleting an aspect of past social unbalance: ghettos and industrial
super-concentrations, zones with high pollution and systemic destruction
of ecosystems. Capital now looks to an ecological future, taking from
environmentalists and espousing an ideology of saving natural resources
that makes it seem possible to build the city of the future with a
"human face", socialist or not.
The real reason that pushes the capitalist project towards these far
away lands of yesterday's utopia is very simple and not philanthropic,
it's based on the necessity to reduce to a minimum class unrest, dulling
the effective antagonism of struggle with a sugary progressive
adjustment founded on unlimited trust on technology.
Of course the best offers will be made to the included in order to avoid
defection, which will tomorrow be the real thorn in the side of
capitalism since individuals coming from the productive process who will
adopt revolutionary projects will have real means to put in service of
revolution against the hegemony of exploitation.
Bu this hope to govern the world through "good" technology already
reveals itself to be unfounded because it doesn't take into account the
problem of the physical dimension to give to the ghetto of the excluded.
The latter could be recycled in a project garden in a mix of happiness
and sacrifice, but only to an extent.
Tension and constant explosions of rage will put in serious peril the
utopia of the exploiters. This was already visible. The issues of
competition e monopoly threatened to involve productive structures in a
series of reoccurring "crises". Production crises, mostly. It was
necessary by the old mentality to reach the so called "economies of
scale", and this was only possible by always increasing the volume of
production so that you could better distribute fixed costs. From this
came the standardization of productive processes; accumulation in the
places where productive units are, chaotically distributed according to
a colonizing logic (for example the "cathedrals in the desert" in
Sicily); product uniformity; the segmentation of work and capital; etc.
The first corrections came from massive state intervention. The
opportunities opened up by this presence were many. The state, no longer
passive spectator, simple "cashier" of capital, but active operator,
"banker" and entrepreneur.
To sum up, decrease of production of use value and increase of
production of exchange value in terms of reaching social peace.
Capital found a partial solution, ending its competitive period. The
state helped, in anticipation of total transformation of economic
production into the production of social peace. This last utopian
project is obviously unreachable. Sooner or later the machine breaks.
The new productive process, often called post-industrial, allows low
costs even for commodities of small volumes of production; it allows
noteworthy modifications to production even without capital increase; it
develops the possibility for never before seen changes in the uniformity
of products. This opens up horizons of "freedom" for the middle classes,
for the productive class, for the same golden isolation of managerial
classes, horizons that used to be inconceivable. It reminds me of the
freedom of the nazi teutonic knights' castle. Around the manor, full of
arms, there is only the peace of graveyards.
None of the authors of post-industrial neocapitalist ideology asked
himself what to do about the danger that will come from there.
Future revolts will get more bloody and terrible. They will be even more
so when we'll know how to transform them into mass insurrections.
The negative selection towards those who will be excluded from the
teutonic knights' castle will be produced by not only unemployment, but
mostly by a lack of real accessibility to data. The new productive model
will necessarily have to decrease availability to knowledge of data.
This is only in part a consequence of digitalisation of society. It's
mostly one of the conditions of new domination, programmed at least
twenty years ago and culminating in a mass schooling that's been emptied
of appropriate cultural instruments.
In the times of the industrial revolution the advent of machines caused
a reduction in the self-determination skills of the masses of workers,
therefore their shackling in factories, destroying the previous farmer
culture and giving to capital a workforce unable to "understand" the new
mechanized world that was being born; similarly now the digital
revolution, tied to the process of adjustment of capitalist
contradictions done by the state, is about to give the factory
proletariat to a new type of mechanism, equipped with a language that
will only be comprehensible to a privileged minority. The rest will be
pushed back and forced to share the fate of the ghetto.
Old knowledge, even the one filtered by intellectuals through the mirror
of ideology, will be coded in machine language and made incomprehensible
with the new necessities. This will be a historical occasion to discover
the lacking content of the ideological stupidity we were fed in the last
two centuries.
Capital will move towards abandoning anything that isn't immediately
translatable in this new generalized language. Traditional education
processes will be depleted more and more of content showing their real
(and selective) substance as commodity.
Instead of language there will be a new canon for behavior made up of
more or less precise rules and based on those old democratizing
processes and assembly functions that capital has already perfectly
learned how to control. This will have the double use of keeping busy
the excluded and making them "participate" to the administration of
public affairs.
Tomorrow's computerised society might perhaps have clean seas and an
"almost" perfect protection of the limited resources of the environment,
but it would be a jungle of rules and prohibitions sadly internalized
and transformed in a deep personal decision to take part in collective
well-being. Without orienting language the excluded won't be able to
read between the lines of the communications of the powerful and will
end up without any voice other than a revolt that will be spontaneous,
irrational and destructively for its own sake.
The same collaboration of the included disgusted by the fictitious
freedom of capital, revolutionary bringers of a small part of that
technology that they'll manage to take away from the hands of capital,
won't be enough to build a bridge or give a language to base a wise and
correct counter-information on.
The organizing work of future insurrections will have to solve this
problem, build from scratch the terms of a communication that is about
to be interrupted and in its closing moment it might erupt spontaneously
and uncontrollably in demonstrations of unprecedented violence.
We shouldn't picture the ghetto as the garbage slums of the past, made
up of the superfluous trash thrown at the miserable. The new ghetto,
coded in the rules of the new language, will be a passive user of future
technology, and will also have rudimentary skills that allow to use the
tools that, rather than satisfy needs, are needs themselves.
These gestures will be so impoverished that they'll be effective in
lowering the quality of life in the ghetto.
Even objects of high productive complexity will be available for
reasonably low costs and advertised with that stressed sense of
exclusivity that excites consumers enthralled by the projects of
capital. With mutated productive conditions we won't have repeated
series production of the same object with great difficulty for
modifications and technological development, but even in the ghetto
we'll have a reproduction of articulated, flexible, interchangeable
processes able to use (at low cost) the new ideas of control and impact
demand, guiding it a realizing the conditions for social peace.
This apparent simplification of life for both the included and excluded,
this technological "freedom" stimulates the dreams of economists and
sociologists who, having always been good people, let themselves go in
picturing an interclassist society capable of "living well" without
awakening the monsters of class war, communism, anarchy.
The lost of interest for worker unions and the emptying of the reformist
meaning that these organizations had in the past, their becoming just a
transmission belt for the masters' orders, are seen as proof of the end
of class war and the coming of an interclassist reality, all parallel to
the coming of post-industrial society.
This makes no sense for several reasons. Syndicalism (of every type)
lost its revolutionary meaning (if it ever had any), even its reformist
one, not because class war is over but because the conditions for the
struggle have changed. We are in front of a continuation with
contradictions that are getting more and more elevated and unsolvable.
Schematically we can reconstruct two phases.
In the industrial period competition of capital and a productive process
based on manufacturing prevail. The main economic sector is the
secondary one, that uses produced energy as its transforming resource
and financial capital as its strategic resource. The technology of this
period is essentially mechanics and the main social figure of production
if the factory worker. The methodology for projects is empiricism, based
on experimentation, while the organization of productive processes as a
whole is based on infinite economic growth.
In the post-industrial period we're going towards, but haven't yet fully
reached especially in Italy, the state prevails on capitalist
competition and imposes its systems of consent manufacturing and orders
production mostly in order to obtain social peace. The technical mode of
production is replaced by data elaboration and the transformation of
services. The main economic sector is the tertiary (services),
quaternary (specialized finance), quinary (research, free time,
education, public administration). The main transforming resource is
information which is made up of a complex system of data transmission
while the main strategic resource is knowledge, which is slowly
replacing financial capital. Technology abandons its mechanical
component and moves to its intellectual one, the typical figure that
uses this technology isn't the factory worker but the technician, the
professional, the scientist. The methodology for projects is founded on
abstract theory and not experimentation, while the organization of
productive processes is based on the codification of theoretical
knowledge.
It's the twilight of worker centrality. Pointing its attention to the
productive industrial phase marxism considered fundamental the
contribution of the working class to the revolutionary solution to
social contradictions. From this came a deep conditioning of the
revolutionary movement's strategy inspired by the goal of conquering
power.
At the base of this logic there was the hegelian misunderstanding,
fueled by Marx, that the dialectical contrast between proletariat and
bourgeoisie could be brought to extreme by indirectly strenghtening the
proletariat through strenghtening capital and the state. This way any
successful repression was interpreted as the anti-chamber of future
proletarian victory. All in a progressive vision, typical of the
enlightenment, of building "spirit" in the material world.
With interesting modifications this old idea of class war lasted until
yesterday, at least in some dreams full of nightmares dreamed up by the
survivors of old projects of glory and conquest. On the theoretical
level a serious critical analysis of this purely fantastical situation
was never produced.
There was only an acknowledgement that worker centrality was delocated
somewhere else. First, shyly, in the sense of a territorial scattering
of factories. Then, more decisively, in the sense of a progressive
substitution of classic secondary sector productive processes with
tertiary ones.
Even anarchists have had their illusions, even these have come to an
end. They never had the illusion of worker centrality, but they've often
seen the role of work as fundamental, with manufacturing leading
agriculture. This was fueled by anarcho-syndicalism.
The last fires of this tendency were seen with the enthusiasm that was
born, and later died, for the spanish CNT rising from the ashes, fueled
particularly from those who today appear as the most radical adherents
to the new "ways" of reformist anarchism.
The base conception that feeds this form of worker centrality (different
from the marxist one but not as much as commonly believed) is the shadow
of the party. Most of the anarchist movement acted for a long time as a
synthesis organization, therefore with some of the weights of a party.
Some comrades may object that these statements are too generic, but they
can't deny that the mentality that sustains the synthesis relationship
that a specific anarchist organization has with the outside reality of
the movement is a relationship close to the classic "party" form.
Good intentions, alone, are not enough.
This mentality has come to an end. Not only in the youngest comrades
that want an open and informal relationship with the revolutionary
movement, but more importantly it has come to an end in the social
reality itself.
If the typical productive conditions of the industry made seem
reasonable a syndicalist struggle or a strategy based on a synthesis
organization, today in a deeply changed reality with a post-industrial
perspective the only possible strategy for anarchists is the informal
one, meaning that groups of comrades uniting with precise objectives,
based on affinity, contribute to create base nuclei that aim to reach
mid-term goals and, in the meantime, build the conditions to transform
situations of revolt into situations of insurrection.
The marxist party is dead.
So is the anarchist synthesis organization. When I read critiques such
as the one developed by social ecologists, who speak of the death of
anarchism, I realize that it's a language misunderstanding, together
with a lack of ability to delve deep in problems. What is dead to them,
and to me too, is the anarchism that thought itself to be an
organizational reference point for the next revolution, that saw itself
as a synthesis structure aimed to sum up all the different ways in which
human creativity coalesces to break state structures of consent and
repression. What died is the static anarchism of traditional
organizations, based on quantitative demands. The hope of seeing social
revolution as something that must necessarily result from our struggles
revealed to be unfounded. It may happen or it may not.
Determinism is dead, and the blind law of cause and effect died with it.
The revolutionary means we employ, including insurrection, don't
necessarily lead to social revolution. In reality there isn't the causal
model that positivists of the last century were fond of. Precisely
because of this revolution becomes possible.
Reducing transfer time of data, decisions are accelerated. Making these
times zero (as it happens when we say "in real time") decisions aren't
accelerated, but transformed. They become something different.
Modifying projects, the elements of productive investment also change
transferring from traditional capital (mostly financial) to future
capital (mostly intellectual).
The management of the different is one of the base elements of real
time.
But power, perfecting the relationship between politics and economics,
stopping the contradictions of competition, organizing the manufacturing
of consent, and most importantly programming all this in real time,
definitively cuts out a large portion of society: the excluded.
The change in speed of productive operations will mostly determine a
cultural and linguistic change. Here we have the greatest danger for the
ghettoised.
In order to deny the legitimacy of power and produce "diversified
behaviors" a shared language is needed, if not of interests. The same
thing was done by parties and unions. The community of language
translated into a fictitious clash of class factions, characterized by
demands of improvement and by the resistance to grant them.
But asking for something presupposes a "community" with who owns what is
being demanded. Now the global repressive project aims to disband this
community. Not necessarily through prison walls, ghettos, peripheral
cities, great industrial areas; instead this is done by decentralizing
production, improving services, ecologising productive mentality, in the
utter segregation of the excluded. This segregation will be achieved by
progressively depriving them of a common language that until today they
had with the other side of society. They won't know what to ask.
The manufacturing of consent was founded, in the industrial period, on a
possible participation to the benefits of production. In a period when
the possibilities of modifying capital are practically infinite,
precisely to achieve this perspective, the couple capital-state will
need a language for itself, separate from that of the excluded.
Inaccessibility to the language of power will cause a segregation even
more effective than the traditional borders of the ghetto. The always
increasing difficulty of understanding the language of power will make
the latter more and more difficult until it becomes absolutely "other".
From that moment it will disappear from the desires of the excluded,
remaining completely ignored. From that moment the included will be
"other" to the excluded, and vice-versa.
In the repressive project this alienation is necessary. The fundamental
concepts of the past, such as solidarity, communism, revolution,
anarchy, were based on the recognized importance of equality. But for
the teutonic knights living in the castle, the excluded won't be men but
objects, just like for our ancestors slaves were only things you could
buy and sell.
We don't have a feeling of equality towards a dog, this is because this
animal only barks, it doesn't speak our language. Because of this we can
love it, but we necessary feel it as "other" and don't mind its fate, at
least not at the level of the whole dog species, and we prefer to be
fond of the dog that provides services such as companionship, affection,
or ferocity towards our enemies.
The same happens for all those who don't share our language. Note that
I'm referring to "language" as a specific way of communicating, not a
national language. Our progressive and revolutionary tradition made us
understand that all men are equal, regardless of differences in skin or
national language. Instead here we have a possible development of the
repressive project aiming to deprive the excluded of the possibility of
communicating with the included. Reducing the availability of the
written word, slowly replacing newspapers and the printing press with
with words transmitted through cables, images, colors and music,
tomorrow's power might build a language appropriate only for the
excluded who will then elaborate many ways, even creative ones, of
linguistic reproduction, but always within their own code, completely
cut out from the code of the included, therefore from any possible
understanding of their world. Its a short path from a lack of
understanding to disinterest and mental closure.
In this sense reformism is on its way to die. Making demands won't be
possible, because there won't be the knowledge necessary to know what to
demand from a world that has stopped being of interest or saying
anything comprehensible. Cut out of the language of the included, the
excluded will also be cut out of the technology built by the former.
They'll maybe live in a better world, more breathable, with decreased
danger of apocalyptic conflict, with progressive weakening of tensions
on economic bases, but there will be an increase of tensions on an
irrational base.
From the peripheral areas of the planet where the penetration of the
exploitation project, despite its "real time", will find obstacles of
ethnic and geographical nature, to the central zones with a more
advanced degree of class division, there will be a move away from
economic struggle towards irrational struggle.
The included and their projects of control will reach for the goal of
gaining consensus by reducing the economic difficulties of the excluded,
they'll even give them prepared languages aimed to a partial and
sclerotic use of technology, they'll be able to prevent explosions of
irrational violence, the one born from feeling useless, boredom and the
lethal atmosphere of the ghetto.
The mass movements that our comrades today are impressed by, keeping
them awake for their dangerousness (and uselessness, they say), point to
the most reasonably foreseeable development of tomorrow's struggles.
Many young people aren't able, already in the present, to come to a
critical evaluation of the situation they're in. Deprived of that
minimum level of culture that schooling once used to give them,
bombarded with messages based on gratuitous and aimless violence,
they're pushed in a thousand ways to an irrational, spontaneous
rebellion that lacks those "political" goals that previous generations
believed to see clearly.
The "places" of these collective explosions and their ways are very
different. The occasions too. But it can be traced back to
insufferability for the management of death imposed by the capital-state
couple.
It's pointless to get scared in front of these manifestations because
they lack those key elements that tradition had taught us to be the
indicators of revolutionary instances in mass movements.
It's not about getting scared but about getting in action before it's
too late.