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Title: Demands Author: A.G.C. Date: 1999 Language: en Topics: Diavolo in corpo, democracy Source: Retrieved on June 18, 2012 from http://feartosleep.espivblogs.net/2012/06/17/demands-by-a-g-c/
“What do you want, my children? Jobs? Regional autonomy? A pay raise?
The vote at the age of 15? Retirement at the age of 45? Equality of the
sexes? Keep on asking in order and all of your complaints will be
properly treated with the due form.”
Every favor that the master grants consolidates him, since he is the
Master. But the fact is that the subjects get what they want. What they
want? Yes, and along the way, they learn to want what they are ordered
to want.
Do I ask the Master leave to fall in love with my aunt? My dear man, the
ideas you have! One doesn’t ask this of the Master.
Why? It is premature; a Ministry of Erotic Relations has not been
created. But will one be created? Without a doubt, and then you will be
able to demand the right to fall in love with whoever you desire. For
now, be patient; and tell me, meanwhile, why not demand the right to
freely import Australian cars? It is not shameful to have a desire for
an Australian car (since it is your right to desire it). Isn’t one the
owner of one’s desires? Why does one want the money one earns if one
cannot spend it on what one desires? Isn’t it intolerable that the
Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs place so many
obstacles in your way that you can’t act on your own? Come on! Let’s
unite – all the partisans for the free importation of cars – and make
our demand. Petitions! Strikes! Demonstrations in the streets!
Presentations of bills by our representatives in the Chambers! Let’s
demand! Good, but it is necessary to recognize that the matter of jobs,
of autonomy, of votes, of wages, of pensions, or that of the equality of
rights between the sexes, is more important and serious than Australian
cars. You mean that these demands are nearer to the desires of people
than Australian cars or amorous relations with my aunt?
It is necessary for us to reflect. What relationship is there between
the creation of jobs and the desire not to work? What relationship is
there between earlier retirement, the four day week, 33 days a year of
vacation, and the desire not to have a schedule whether it’s Saturday or
Monday so that one can pass night freely as the moon turns around us or
go gather blackberries whenever your friends and the blackberries ask it
of you? What relationship is there between regional (or, pardon,
national or whatever one wants to call it) and the desire of people not
to have to obey decisions originating from above or not to tolerate
taxes the purpose of which the don’t know and organizations the use of
which they don’t understand? How does such autonomy, granted or to be
granted, approach the desire of individuals to reach an agreement
between those of the countryside and those of the city and its
surroundings in all the circumstances that commonly present themselves?
What relationship is there between the vote for adolescents and the
desire never to become an adult? What relationship is there between the
right of women to occupy the positions of men and the desire that the
domination of men ceases? Between the right of a woman to have the
children she wants, with who and when she wants and the urgent desire
that more future car buyers are not born every year?
Finally, one can devote oneself to having nothing to do with this; but
it is necessary to be realistic, my friend, and certainly these demands
are a step forward, toward more advanced goals in the direction of these
latter aims you speak about so naively. Autonomy, just like the
nationalization of enterprises, moves toward the goal of an authentic
liberation of Capital and the State. The vote for adolescents is a means
by which to impose laws that are less and less dictated by the criteria
of adults and are more and more youthful. Pay raises are of use to
workers and to employees at least until there’s a new raise in prices
and a new demand, because they feel that they are more their own master
and find themselves in a better position to impose their class interests
on the bodies that exploit them. The four-day work week and the
seven-hour work day represent a step forward toward the progressive
liberation from forced labor and for enjoying one’s free time. The
equality of women in society and at work is a step… for the things they
desire.
Yes,… If today some still continue to believe that things function in
this way, if they don’t perceive the quality of the positive outcome of
demands, if they don’t understand one bit how the apparatus functions
and that the demands that succeed are always revealed to be a swindle,
as well as a renewal and reinforcement of the powers that be, then it
means that one must have studied realism at the Polytechnic Institute of
Colorful Dreams.
Oh, demands! Words have their destiny. This well-known legal term is
already ill-omened. The Latin word for “demand” is a legal term, rei
vindicatio[1] [literally “king’s protection or vengeance]: a claim of
something one considers as one’s property. I imagine that this is what
the swindle has been based on. It seems that initially the operation
worked like this: the one who demanded the right to something – a piece
of land, for example – together with another who made a counter-claim
presented themselves before a magistrate or judge and set to work on the
matter in question – a clump of disputed earth for example – so that,
being informed by the arguments of both claimants, each claiming to own
the right to the thing, the judge would make a decision and grant it to
one or to the other. It is clear that, in time, in this triangle formed
by two rivals and a representative of the law with the miserable thing
at the center, the relations between terms are changed in a significant
way. In fact, whereas in this original scheme, the hands of the
claimants were directed toward the thing, and whereas the authority
appeared to remain above and outside the conflict – as an impartial
witness and a above all judge between the hands for disposing of the
thing in the just position (to the one side, or to the other side, or,
like Solomon, right down the middle of the thing)—, today, due to
demands among other things the plot has advanced to such a point that
the hands, both of them, all of them, are directed toward the heights,
toward the summit on which the judge stands, while from below, they ask
for the concession or the free distribution of the thing demanded;
which, consequently – and this is obvious, has become, first of all, the
property of the judge who can thus, yielding to requests and pressure,
hand it over to those whose claims he considers to be just.
There is no need to dwell on the fact that this process has constituted
and still constitutes a way of guaranteeing and strengthening power. But
then in the meantime such a process could not be carried to its end
without an accompanying change of the thing itself. In the original
shema, this might still be a bit of earth, maybe a slave, in short, a
thing with obvious utility and use value for those who lay claim to it.
But when the things have become concessions from the Master, have
further more become abstract rights, amounts of time and money,
arrangements for the future improvement of working conditions or the
legal position of the claimant and, at the extreme point of the
bureaucratic progress of the State and the corporation, a change in the
editing of a paragraph of regulation, the creation of a new department
for the administration of satisfied demands, the appearance of a few
initials such as “Smug 3-m-25” the importance of which the claimants
still don’t understand, and their official representatives or the
experts on the subject are there to pretend that they, yes, they are
able to understand.
And another transformation accompanies the one around the claimants. To
the extent that they grow accustomed to modifying their cries in
accordance with the initials and numbers that the social order imposes
on them, they present their claim in the language of order, in a way
that this order can understand their demand and act in consequence; at
they same time, they cannot avoid becoming convinced little by little on
their own that this was really what they desired – cars within
everyone’s reach, 33 vacation days a year, retirement at 45, color
television, a confirmed minimum wage, a clean niche in a protected
apartment block, equality of rights, a democratic constitution,
horizontal labor unions and two hundred miles of highway – ; so that in
the end their desires com to coincide with the development projects of
the state and business. And these fine people, by whom it is presumed
that the desire for things and the capacity of enjoying them come, only
constitute a small domestic motor that, while it continues to produce
work, produces the petitions which power and money need in order to
change and continue to perpetuate themselves.
But, oh! My heart, stop reasoning and limit yourself to proposing to
your comrades in suffering the following cry: “Citizens, don’t make
demands!” Lets demand no more. Let’s leave them to do their best on
their own to organize themselves and us (to the extent to which we leave
things be), and to advance towards the end that governs all their
functions, towards death. Undoubtedly, they will continue to much harm
to people, but still less than they would have done if we, the ones
below, were to collaborate through our demands. Of course! And in the
meantime, every one considers the rights that seem good to them, and so
as not to demand and not to make a claim to the Master that this is
justice, everyone takes the thing directly in hand. But, old chap, where
are you trying to get to? Anarchy? Chaos? Don’t choke yourself, comrade.
I’ll talk to you about chaos another day.
[1] Unfortunately, a literal translation was not possible for this
passage. In Italian, the word for a demand is “rivendicazione” which
comes directly from this Latin term. The English “demand” comes from a
Latin base as well: de + mandare, which apparently means “to entrust to”
, and so is, in its own way, equally ill-omened for those of us seeking
to determine our lives on our own terms.