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Title: Insurrection Everywhere: A Short Essay Author: Ultragauche Date: 2021 Language: en Topics: Insurrection, communism Notes: Just some thoughts about the present state of affairs.
i. As we sit and think, morning and night, what is it that we think
about? It is about the next meal! We are always hungry; food is the fuel
that powers us to think, to build, to love. It may be about the next
drink, which hydrates our cells and tissues, and that serves as a
catalyst and solvent for every single biochemical reaction within us
that allows us to pursue the arts, politics, and philosophy. The birth
of the insurrection starts with the thirsty mouth, the empty stomach,
and the homeless person.
Truly, what is it that drives us to produce? To think? Maybe, under
threat of death, we are driven to produce; and reproduce capital
aimlessly. Is that our meaning in society? Yes! There is no good, there
is no evil, there is no thinking, doing. There is only capital and
bourgeoise society. Aside from production, what do we truly think about?
Our sentience — all the way down to how our neurotransmitters fire — is
simply, a commodity. When people think, they think about living and
life.. the good times, the drinking, partying, fucking.
Those being good thoughts. No one thinks about the misery, destitution,
or the reality of their condition as fetishized serial numbers. No one
really wants to. As Spinoza said, why do people fight for servitude as
if it were salvation — might I add: why do people desire servitude over
salvation? Every fiber of thinking — every lived moment, is spent
longing.. desiring to be a slave.
Everyone is a serial number, no one has a name, life. If you inform
someone addicted to any drug about their condition, they will tell you
they know. If you tell a slave about their condition as a slave, they
will tell you they know. But if you tell another serial number about
their condition as nameless wage slaves, they will — ever so ardently —
negate everything and assure you that they live as free as possible. Is
it because the chains aren’t clear enough?
Must they be physical in order for them to realize their condition?
There is no way — yet we make justifications. With our invisible chains
on, we keep demanding more from the state. Which simply reaffirms the
flow of power upwards. We want universal basic income, which in reality
is universal basic enslavement to the state. We want universal
healthcare, yet we willfully consume poisoned garbage.
What we are fighting for, our “freedom” is just more state control. We
must look beyond what the State and Capital can grant us; demand the
impossible, and unconditionally demand it. When we ask Capital what it
can grant us, we set a limit to ourselves, a limit that Capital will
prevent us from reaching. However, by relentlessly demanding
impossibility, the realm of what’s possible fades away, and then what
was impossible simply becomes what is necessary.
So, when we think, do we think beyond the states’ embrace? Is there
truly life outside of the boundaries set by Capital? Demanding
impossibility — that’s irrational! Yes it is! Beyond rationality, lies
an irrationality so anti-capital; so anti-normal, it forces Capital to
force its rationalization onto subjects. It is a profane act of
violence; a violence so powerful that subjects beg for it, in the name
of compliance.
ii. What is it about domination and subjugation that excites us? What is
it about wanting to control the flow of power? The bourgeoise
controlling the proletariat, men dominating women, heterosexuals
bullying homosexuals, I can go on. Of course, looking through
archaeology you will not find the power imbalances we see today — you
will find different ones, ones that differ based on culture and relation
to lords, non-capitalist production, et cetera.
Power is not an institution, it is not something a person can grasp, or
something that can enslave — power is a relation that exists in every
single corner of society. These power relations provoke, produce, and
incite knowledge, which stabilize, modify, and actualize institutions
such as schools, prisons, and hospitals — institutions that divide,
classify, identify, and regulate subjects. Foucault realized this 40
years ago. Since power is not something tangible… but knowledge and
institutions are. Whoever controls the knowledge; the institutions, we
see the flow of power move against the subjects.
This cycle repeats itself in bourgeoise society. Liberals realized this
a century ago, when they though that they can directly control power.
They the realized that by controlling where power flows through, they
can indirectly control power. There is no such duality between powerful
and powerless. There is power even in the most disenfranchised of the
proletariat. This “revolutionary power” in the proletariat is we are
supposed to materially self-empower with, yet capital maintains a firm
hold on our subjectivity, thus proletarian subjectivity in capitalist
society is simply bourgeoise subjectivity.
Proletarian power in capitalist society is bourgeoise power, so long as
it’s the bourgeoise empowering the proletariat, and not the proletariat
themselves — a paradox that only revolution can solve. So, what is it
about domination and subjugation? What is it about power? In communized
society, there is no authority or subjects, no commodity fetishism,
there is only living. Lived experience is no longer lived capital,
bourgeoise subjectivity is abolished. The radical transformation of
society is the last stage of evolution. The nothingness of existence
becomes surreal, and will remind us that beyond lived capitalist
existence, existence has always been an amoral, non-sentient
nothingness.
iii. To put it simply, the state is a panopticon. The institution of
spying on subjects is universal — yet no one knows when their computers
are hacked and their phones wiretapped. The constant surveillance and
non-surveillance serve as deterrents for activity. There is no surprise
that the founder of utilitarianism invented the panopticon — and so the
panopticon is utility in its purest form. So what is the antithesis?
Suicide is the most anti-utilitarian action, because, quite literally,
you are no longer useful to control society, but there lies a
contradiction: how is it that suicidal people are admitted to
institutions to “prevent them from dying”, yet the state
indiscriminately kills with impunity — the homeless killed via exposure,
refugees dying in turbulent waters, scores of lgbtq people murdered, the
list goes on.
The panopticon of the state has no use for such abnormality.. they are
required to die in order for capital to reproduce itself, and the state
to continue its surveillance. Ungovernable people are not util, thus
utilitarian society sees no use in them. Abnormal people have no
function in normal society, thus have no rational reason to exist within
it.
The panopticon surveils all — all normal, rational, reasonable people
live within its walls, confined, extorted, governed, identified,
controlled, and exploited. Control society has power over life and
death.. they can define a life worth saving and a live worth killing —
Agambens’ “Homo Sacer”. What does insurrection entail, then? How can we
restore a life once deemed non-worthy? Destruction of the panopticon
should suffice, not just its extensions as the social democrats would
believe; but the entire structure. Every single facet, shell,
bourgeoise, abolished. On the outside, there is the chaotic purity of
life.
iv. The most humanist of capitalist can say that “he loves human rights”
and proceed to support imperialism and murder, and he would be telling
the truth. The way the liberal order uses “human rights” is not the
concept that everyone should live humanely. If that were the case, we
wouldn’t see concentration camps at the border, the bombings in the
Middle East, prisons, refugees getting shot by European border guards,
etc etc. They use “human rights” as the justification to expand the
empire by ascribing liberal morality on to every single human. Liberals
don’t even directly say that “human rights exist”.
They say they “believe in human rights” that absolves them from
criticism when they flagrantly support water protectors getting arrested
for oil pipelines and continued war in the Middle East — much in the
same way how Christians say that they “believe that God is good” rather
than “god is good”, that absolves them from criticism when children die
malnourished every single day and people unjustly killed. There was no
liberal moral revolution — there was only evolution of feudal morality
into capital. The paradox of their morality is one that frees them from
hypocrisy.
v. What is it to revolt? What is insurrection? Insurrection is the
complete denial of authority, and under every single pretext,
insurrection is justified. Justice and order may prevail; it may be
eternal.. eternal peace, but no amount of justice and order can quell
the flame of insurrection, much less the spark that ignites it.
Perfection is not safe from the ethereal — yet so profound — spark of
insurrection. Perfection will never last, because insurrection cannot be
stopped. Insurrection is a thorn in the side of Order, it is he
acceptance of nothing, it is the flame that consumes all notions of
Order, it is the rejection of acceptance. The side of life is the side
of insurrection and the side of death is the side of acceptance —
surviving is only the mediation.
The liberal death cult of utility and its constant need to categorize
and identify things has led us to this point. The most virulent form of
liberalism: humanism, is the highest stage of commodity fetishism. In
order to maximize liberal control, we must maximize production. The
maximization of disaster; its acceleration, is humanism. The humanist
and the utilitarian are the same people — those who oppose control and
the metaphysical separation of man and nature, those who cannot be
subjected, identified, subverted, categorized, and rationalized, those
people are the enemy.
Insurrection abolishes categorization, subjugation, rationalization,
subjugation, and every aspect of control society. Of course the liberal
opposes! They say “the science”, “the fact”, the “truth”, but little do
they realize that the very language they use to communicate the science,
the truth, the facts, is all sculpted, shaped, and formed from and
conditioned by social, cultural, and historical factors and
associations; ones that change and evolve constantly. The insurrection
is the triumph of life, one which does not conform to the model, the
ideal, and the subject.
vi. The death of the insurrection is the surrender of the left. If the
first response to any disaster, whether biological or war, measures the
existence of the state, that is the liberal defeat of insurrection.
There will always be a disaster, crisis, because that’s how capitalism
maintains its hold. Rabidly supporting bourgeoise interests during the
disaster — even once — turns the communist into a collaborator. Engaging
in bourgeoise opportunism even once is enough to sacrifice the
insurrection. When they say to participate in their opportunism is to
“save lives”, just know that the lives of 10 people will be sacrificed
to the machine for every life saved.
This is capital — a chronic crisis that continues to tug the
heartstrings of the communist. Every year there seems to be a disaster,
and in every disaster we hear the motif “it’s for saving lives”. It
seems as if the state has infinite scenarios to quell the flame of
insurrection, and the communist keeps giving it reasons to keep going.
How can the insurrection continue if we keep siding with the state
during every crisis?
There is never a reason to side with the state, even in matters of life
or death. The state does not care about life or death, it cares about
perpetuating itself, and maintain the flow of power upwards. The
insurrection is firm on its ideals of abolition. If now, in 2021, it
takes a virus for the Left to completely abandon its ideals of abolition
to ardently support the state in its measures to “save lives” (yet in
the process, lets the homeless die to exposure, lets a single mother get
evicted, lets a poverty stricken family starve, forcefully extracts the
surplus value of laborers, denies health benefits to the most
vulnerable, and turns a blind eye to the atrocities committed by the
Empire), I cannot imagine where the allegiance of the Left will lie come
the Insurrection.
The end of the crisis is the victory of the insurrection. The victory of
the insurrection comes from the rejection of bourgeoise opportunism. So
long as we continue to break down and support the state in times of
inconvenience, the insurrection remains dead. Only through proletarian
self-determination and rejection of the states faux embrace, can the
insurrection live. Insurrection everywhere is not an ideal to be
established, or a condition to be won. It is constant evolution;
constant life — always in rejection of death and control.
In solidarity.