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Title: Off the Leash Author: Anonymous Date: Spring 2012 Language: en Topics: individualist Source: Retrieved on June 10, 2012 from http://darkmatter.noblogs.org/ Notes: Introduction to “Off the Leash. Iconoclastic words from Zo d’Axa, Albert Libertad, Emile Armand, Renzo Novatore, Enzo Martucci and Erinne Vivani”, Dark Matter Publications, 2012
The defeat and subjugation of the populations of the planet has been the
victory of the socialised mentality over individualistic wildness. We
are supposed to believe that this world’s problems, such as poverty and
oppression, are the fault of those old Christian bugbears Selfishness,
Greed, Pride, Hate and Immorality more generally. Nothing could be
further from the truth. This moralising narrative demands, like any
morality, self-mutilation and increased repression.
The forced slave march down the road of ‘Human Progress’ has been led by
various deified abstractions over mountains of corpses, bulldozing
through the wild woods to plant monocultures drip-fed subservience. It
has been the march of the phantoms. Never letting any being be
sufficient in itself, these deities demand sacrifices and mete out
justice, bestow rights and responsibilities, and are the cause which is
to be followed, the beat to synchronise the rhythm of life to, the order
into which one fits. These phantoms are potentised by the loss, socially
and self-inflicted, of individual power, vitality, bio-energy. Max
Stirner talked of spooks, Karl Marx of fetishes, Friedrich Nietzsche of
idols. (Marx and Nietzsche though were moralists in their own right,
smashing old idols to replace with new ones.) These phantoms are
sovereign concepts which stand above the individual, demanding
obedience. Individual potency (including sexual) becomes alienated from
us, invested in the phantoms that now dominate us. Whether we potentise
a God, a Great Leader, or Capital we are alienated from our own being,
our own potentialities. Unless they remain our tool or plaything,
concepts, groupings, systems, and so on turn us into tools and
playthings.
As Sigmund Freud described, civilisation is based on permanent
repression of individual instincts, on renunciation, causing a constant
tension between individual desires and the instilled control patterns,
which lead to suffering and neuroses. All the varied desires we have are
repressed in favour of the morality system. Selfishness, greed, pride,
hate – not to mention free expressions of caring, sharing, vulnerability
and love – are subjugated by external control patterns of behaviour,
creating individuals that are useful to Society and its rulers. Society,
beginning mostly with the Family, enforces it’s domestication of the
individual, sapping our vitality by repressing with fear and shame our
instinctual desires, our
free-creating-playful-sexual-agressive-selfish-joyful-inquisitiveness.
Look around you – everywhere there are people who are afraid of living
for themselves, afraid of self-ownership, unable to feel accomplishment
or power except through being part of the Mass, a Useful Part of
something or other: lifted up by their Leaders, victorious though their
Sports Team, empowered by Group Pride (Nation, Religion, Ethnicity,
Class, etc), made “complete” by their partner or parents or kids. These
characteristics of suppression of self-centred desires in favour of
reified phantoms, zombies animated by our alienated potency, may be
obvious in the patriarchal, Christian honest worker and loyal citizen
but are just as present in ‘radicals’ and ‘revolutionaries’ who, most of
the time, simply have an alternative Faith.
The mass of the oppressed have so far not liberated themselves because,
when they even rise up against the oppressors, they have generally
followed ‘Revolutionary’ ideologies that call for renunciation of
individual desires, have simply changed patterns of authoritarian
behaviour rather than overcoming these patterns. The waves of
self-defeating capitulation by the oppressed have allowed increasingly
horrifying events to take place – wars, ecological devastation,
genocide, social re-engineering – that have, at the very least,
tarnished the optimistic viewpoint of socialistic revolutionaries. Three
paths are presented – a deeper, perhaps more nihilistic and less
optimistic, certainly less populist, examination of our situation that
stops seeing society as the innocent victim; surrender, making peace
with the existent in the name of ‘pragmatism’, ‘reform’ or ‘evolution’
to pursue reasonability; and, of course, shutting our eyes very tightly,
covering our ears and repeating the mantra of our belief in ‘a better
future’ very loudly. The working class war mobilisations of the two
‘World Wars’, and the ‘betrayals’ of the mass social democratic and
communist movements, led some revolutionaries in the West to challenge
themselves to understand the consequences of these phenomena.
Optimistic socialistic anarchists believed, and continue to believe,
that Society and the State are in conflict, are separate, and have used
populist rhetoric to try to raise the masses against what is depicted as
external to them – greedy rich men and unscrupulous politicians –,
rather than attacking the submissive attitudes of the people that allow
the rich and powerful to ride on their shoulders. Responsibility is
shifted to the external enemy and the masses are depicted as victims,
rather than as the main upholders of domination. The individualist
current in the Western revolutionary tradition, on the other hand, have
had no problem laying the blame for the masses subjugation directly at
the feet of the submissive themselves, while still aiming their guns and
bombs at the rulers and their most active agents, like the police,
journalists, bureaucrats, priests and military. Feeling the need for
revolt in their bodies, those of an individualist-nihilistic bent never
needed to justify their insurrection in terms of ‘the Will of the
People’, ‘History’ or ‘Justice’; and have always been quite prepared to
forego optimism in favour of honesty and pragmatism in favour of
dignity. Amid the catastrophe of history, these individuals were free in
the only way anyone can be free, by seizing freedom for themselves.
All previous civilizations have crashed. This one – global, industrial,
and cybernetic – will also crash. The consequences will simply be much
greater than the collapse of previous civilisations that have left ruins
covered by sand and over-run by jungles. As long as civilization – the
techno-economic-statist concrete infrastructure as well as the social
dynamics – functions, the individualistic human will remain an outcast
and an enemy. Only the destruction of civilisation, by the systems own
crises and limits, as well as ‘the barbarians’ attacks and increasing
desertion, can spell an end to mass society and open the way for a
multiplication of chaotic worlds of small group autonomy and the free
play of egoistic individuals forming relations based on desire rather
than duty. Of course there’s every possibility that we’ll all be wiped
out by some combination of nuclear, biological, chemical and nanotech
catastrophes, climate change and pandemics. But if there is any better
future it will come from a refusal of all the submissive attitudes, all
the bowing before domination, all the abdications of our individual
self-responsibility, all the renunciations of our desires and the
self-stunting by illusionary ‘realisms’ and ‘responsibilities’ and
‘weaknesses’. Anarchy never was the harmonious perfect society imagined
by the socialistic, and we can only truly conceive of anarchy as
re-wilding. Let us be clear – mass technological society is incompatible
with freedom, as we experience bodily, grasp logically if we allow the
heretical thoughts through, and can see in the world around us, and by
looking at the past and imagining our futures. Only in the ruins of the
urban centres, of the global infrastructure networks, of all the
cultural edifices of civilization, with weeds breaking the concrete can
we re-wild to dance under bright stars. But we live for now – if it’s
the end of the world, let’s dance and laugh right here and now!
“If history is not an infinite process, as I firmly believe,” wrote the
individualist Enzo Martucci, “than when it exhausts its cycle it will
disappear opening the way to anarchy. If, on the other hand, history
endures, then anarchism will remain – that is, the eternal revolt of the
individual against a stifling society.”
Here we publish these texts by a few enemies of society alive in Italy
and France in the late 19^(th) and early 20^(th) centuries as a
celebration of the rebellious and individualistic zest for life. Rather
than detached thinkers these were individuals of action, active
perpetrators of the crime of freedom – the crime that contains all
crimes –, ready and willing to rob the rich and attack the State, not
for ‘some cause’ but for themselves.