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Title: The Swelling of Leeches Author: Cocktail Furies Date: Fall/Winter 2004 Language: en Topics: green anarchy, Green Anarchy #18, civilization, culture Source: Retrieved on 21 August 2018 from http://greenanarchy.anarchyplanet.org/files/2012/05/greenanarchy18.pdf Notes: from Green Anarchy #18, Fall/Winter 2004
Rising from our bloody birth fluids, we leave the warm familiarity of
the organic Precambrian ooze, and our (still free) consciousness begins
its brutal interaction with a hostile all-encompassing social
organization – a coldly-oppressive, mechanistic SYSTEM that demands our
conformity and our docile assimilation into its robot-like “community.”
This large-scale Institution of regularity and uniformity emits many
fragrant odors and force-feeds us the myth of its artificial,
manufactured Perfection, but this is nothing more than a bubble of film,
conjurer’s trickwork projected over the actual landscape of exhaustion –
a graveyard of slave laborers reduced to dehumanized components of the
capitalist Imperium, absorbed into the anonymity of social and economic
structures. Like prefabricated automatons, they represent and embody a
historical process, the abstraction of the individual which lies at the
heart of mass production. They are the adults, the domesticated, the
BROKEN; the dull who delight in the following of petty rules, the
standardized functionaries who (through the scientific conditioning of
the Command machine) are under the remote control of the aristocracy;
unable to think or act without permission, these vacuous sleepers are
“animated” only by the daily struggle for survival, the desperate hope
of escape from the place which history has made for them.
This drugged stupor (chemicals not required!) that passes for life and
awareness is OUR future too, for there is spell/code, an “abracadabra”
implanted in the brain of every child educated/ processed by
civilization, the mantra of restriction – a SLAVE IDEOLOGY designed to
set limits on autonomous thought and to successfully inoculate against
any shift in allegiance. Brought up on a vast array of lunatic imprints,
our habit-encrusted former minds are blind servants to the repetition
compulsion, carrying out the work of our Masters in servile compliance.
We all wear the same mask of submission and the message everywhere is of
Power.
The more we study the hierarchical conspiracy, the more we realize how
consistent it is with the pattern of modern history, that is, the
Official discourse of human social development. From symbols and
rituals, from the religious and cultural myths of Egypt, Persia and
Mesopotamia to high-tech subliminals and the propaganda in printed
advertising that the eye doesn’t recognize, the pattern was set long
ago, and there has been no deviation from it since the dawn of
civilization. Although the facts have been doctored to fit the approved
concepts of the Dominant Culture, there is little doubt that a New Order
of domestication began with the march of agriculture, and the male
accumulation of Capital and political power (patriarchy).
An immense institutional and ideological complex – a social pyramid –
took hold and spread by contagion. Protection is the first necessity of
opulence and luxury and the first Pharaohs had to be protected. The
whole social order, favorable to their hygienic idleness and parasitism,
required a cycle of conquest, extermination, and a chronic economy of
war to quell the constant rebellions against Capital’s enclosure.
Civilization was faced with the technical challenge of enforcing
stringent parameters policing the levels of discontent within its
boundaries. The slaves and prisoners were fed small humiliations,
everyday defeats, despair and dullness in negligible doses that settled
down in them, layer after layer, like sediment, until their souls were
choked with sludge. They soon became blind and cannibalistic.
The chimera of commodity culture has commodified anxiety (the surplus
economy of the chattering classes reclining horizontally under the
watchful beady eye of the psychiatric police.) Neurotic society thrives
upon the crisis of its own insecurity; self-obsessed, picking at its own
leaking sores to perpetuate irritation – the festering signs of its
profitable dis-ease. It is the luminous specter of aesthetic pestilence
and (s)existential illness, downgrading pleasure towards the sanctioned
static of TV catatonia; an apparition of security and comfort delivering
only inculcated fear and vexation.
A montage of cattle-like herds, grinding machinery and clocks litter the
distressed landscape in which the putrescent waste pipes and factory
death-fumes are evidence of the irreversible process of entropy. The
prisoner continues to work, expending his/her energy to manufacture
their own eradication, when freedom finally arrives in the form of
death. The prisoners take on the nature of a commodity because the
conditions that create their absolute dependence on the system are
reproduced in the mesmerizing effects of THE PRODUCT. THE PRISONERS’ OWN
ENERGY ENCASES THEM.
Capitalism has wired work and consumption with a morbid intimacy and the
liberation of the prisoners is negotiated according to the axioms of
industrial dispute, taking wage control and “benefits” to be the only
effective bargaining tokens. “We want the right to work, we want equal
pay” represents the demand for universal prostitution pimped out to the
exhaustive transactions of “organized labor.” The prisoners continue to
offer praise to the servile Machine, patronizing the dedicated slave
mimicry of its parental masters; they extol the virtues of “the supreme
and original program” – the work ethic – and have sentimental feelings
for the test-tube from which they were conceived. THE HYPNOTIC STATE IS
THE PSYCHOTIC STATE.
A madman is laying waste to the planet. This madman’s imposed social
order – civilization – is a laboratory producing monstrosities,
incessantly mutilating and massacring individuals, eco-systems and life
itself through its technology of prostitution and its logic of
totalistic submission. Bhopal, Agent Orange, the invasion of Iraq, Mad
Cow Disease – these are not “blunders” but rather part of the
inescapable tendency of capitalist production and civilization’s
cumulative effect on the meta-biological scale.
To “manage” its own contradictions and rebellious “by-products” the
System has invested considerable energy into the construction of a vast,
colossal ideological dam, against which a reservoir of expanding energy
presses, heaving under the strain, creaking and groaning with the
expansion of unrealized lives.
The cerebral zenith of this ideological con job is the cold equation of
life with work, and the bland assertion that the social dislocation
caused by progress and mechanization was “inevitable”. If Capital can
extend its accumulative logic back to prehistory, which suggests the
will to civilization in the species’ infancy, then the concept of
manufacture (the production of objects and objectivity) must be counted
as the principle feature grounding social grouping. This massive LIE has
been oversubscribed as a generic myth secreted beneath every obliging
account of the linear development from cave dweller to cul-de-sac
resident. And like any archetypal narrative de(in)scribing the process
of accumulation, such anecdotes are mediated by metaphors which honor
the necessities of exchange-value, hence there is a price to pay FOR
civilization (so the metaphor goes), and that price is the inhibition of
primary instincts in return for the sublimated profits of the modern
social topography with all its mediated exchanges.
When humans began to organize life into an economic system of commodity
exchange, the spirit of life began to leave this place, and we began a
long journey through misery. We say this “Trail of Tears” is over. We
say it’s time to take off our armor and come out to play. OUR FANGS
GLINT, AS WE PROWL WITH OLD EYES THAT MOVE WITH A SPIRIT IN ITS WAKE...
We despairingly toil to subsist in a damned world where business
adversaries fight wars over the carrion of States, where corporate
dynasties set their nightmares loose to graze on their shattered and
dazed prisoners – mere meat stockpiled for the victory feast of the New
World Order. Everyone sleeps here in a single grave; a generalized
denial, or dislocation of awareness, woven into the fabric of daily life
– a condition of pervasive surrender to the strangulation of our planet.
It would appear that this autocratic system of coercion is consolidating
its power and strengthening the dominance of its’ capitalist
organization, nakedly preparing for a final, bloody saturnalia of mass
slaughter. Except for one unavoidable glitch in the Mechanization
process: CULTURE PROGRAMMING IS NOT ALWAYS SUCCESSFUL. More and more of
us have broken out of the complex maze of scarred neurostructures and
caught glimpses of the Totality of the System as distinguished from the
fantasies promulgated by the advertising priests or in junior high
school government classes. We have become utterly cognizant of the
dominant minority’s conspiracy of power, awakened to the inevitable doom
of the Empire, and for us there is no possibility of reintegrating into
the pathology of the biocidal Control Machine. WE ARE NOT “MINOR
ANOMALIES”. THE FISSURES IN THE SURFACE OF OUR MINDS ARE ALSO FISSURES
IN THE SURFACE OF SOCIETY. With the dissolution of our mental bonds, we
have become economically useless, unfit for service, and unwilling to be
sacrificed. Our existence spoils the symmetry of Leviathan’s “perfect”
mechanical order and as anti-hypnotic agents, we’re encouraged by the
growing prospects for authentic (non-choreographed) rebellion. For while
Capital may indeed have our bodies in its jaws, we also live in a period
of warp-speed cultural disintegration and unprecedented opportunities
for anarchic deconstruction abound...
The system is realizing a thermodynamic boiling point; the core is
heating up, achieving the stage of no return: civilization is attaining
critical mass, speeding up, increasing velocity until a
hyper-instantaneous terminal impact shatters the glass console into
10,000 pieces of wreckage. In the rearview mirror Sade’s perpetual
motion machine spins dangerously from its centrifuge, propelling pieces
of debris – dismembered limbs and engine components flying in all
directions. Each glance into the mirror yields a myriad of disasters
captured in edited sequence by the egomaniacal Spectacle. The talismans
of the Empire are being trampled upon by ripping tornadoes of change,
and the Pentagon of Power is revealed to be a dilapidated palace of
cracked, degenerate plastic.
Amidst all this carnage, the Left (an equally condemned excrescence of
capitalism) acts out its own perennial self-doubt; a dramatic travesty
of political decline producing sham performances of expected civil
“disobedience”. The Left’s “demonstrative” routines (and thorough
befuddlement) become symbolically performative once redemptive LESSONS
can be squeezed from its corrupt LESIONS. Passing beyond the perplexity
of the Left, we see in the flames of civilization immeasurable
possibilities for a boundless, unconfined existence.
As anarchists (individuals opposed to ALL systems) we have no desire to
ameliorate the downfall of this fading power structure or to “save” the
human race from itself. We’re not interested in “curing” or
“restructuring” the system and we’re even more repulsed by the Leftist
version of “revolution”. Our dreams and our praxis are explicitly
anti-authoritarian, but as an autonomous anarchist cell, our primary
motivation’s different from many of our starry-eyed, idealist
associates. While we derive joy and a sense of personal liberation from
the act of defiance itself, we consider the concept of a “mass social
movement” to be an ungrounded, delusional abstraction, and are not
stimulated to revolt by self-deceptive optimism. As individuals, we’re
in this struggle for a more primal reason and it’s cold and it’s old and
it’s easy to understand: revenge.
Revenge for 10,000 years of abuse, of class predation, of sensual
repression, of global usurpation, of being obliged to bow our knees to
Caesar’s iron-rod rule. Capital’s currency is nothing more than the sum
total of our damaged hearts and minds, the symbolic representation of
our ancestors’ blood, of all the species and cultures scoured to
extinction, of all the Earth’s wounds. Ours will be a high-tempo fluid
war that has no defined fronts or formations, designed to suck our enemy
into traps of His own creation, taking advantage of the System’s
stupidities and weaknesses and avoiding its strengths.
We’re sharpening our arrowheads, invisible hunters with nothing left to
lose. Cum! Cum! Let’s be going!