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Title: Bolo’bolo
Author: P.M.
Date: 1983
Language: en
Topics: utopia, fiction, autonomous communities, language, anthropology

P.M.

Bolo’bolo

Introduction to the Third English Edition

bolo’bolo 30 Years Later

bolo’bolo was first published in 1983 (German edition) and is reprinted

here in its original form. After the crisis of the seventies, that had

ended the post-war cycle, it was meant to show a plausible way out.

Thirty years later the same crisis — with all its permutations — is

still unresolved, and we’re still looking for a way out. The basic

questions are still the same: how can we find a way of life that is

really sustainable, ecologically and socially? The limits of growth were

already known thirty years ago, but climate change was a thing of the

future, and looked preventable. Now climate change is a fact, and all we

can do is try to mitigate its effects. At the same time, the divisions

among the inhabitants of this planet have become deeper in a dramatic

way. The richest ten per cent of the world population now own 85 per

cent of its assets. The richest one per cent owns forty per cent of

them. The poorer half of the world population earns only one per cent of

the overall income, the other half, 99 per cent. In 1960 the richest

fifth lived on an income thirty times higher than the poorest fifth; by

2000, it was already eighty times more.

No wonder the twenty per cent of the world population that live in

relative comfort are defending their life style with fences, border

patrols, wars. Refugees from poverty are dying in the Mediterranean

every day. The area of the A-deal has become a gated community, an

antisocial fortress. But the price is high, the world has become a

dangerous place, and life within or outside the comfort zone is getting

precarious. The situation looks much grimmer than thirty years ago.

On the other hand capitalism has never been as discredited as now. The

conviction that it doesn’t work and should be abolished is the common

sense of our times. (Is Michael Moore our new Thomas Paine?) This common

sense is so overwhelming, that most people don’t even bother to

criticize capitalism any more, but rather invest their energies directly

in finding ways out of it. According to a study of the BBC, only eleven

percent of the world population thinks that capitalism works well. In

France, Mexico and the Ukraine more than forty percent demand that it

should be replaced by something completely different. There are only two

countries, where more than one fifth of the people think that capitalism

works well in its present form: the USA (25 percent) and Pakistan

(21 percent).

Ideas already presented in bolo’bolo are part of a larger common sense

now. Degrowth, the commons, transition towns, cooperatives, climate

justice, are all aspects of a global way out of capitalism. Almost every

day there is a new contribution to the pool of alternative ideas, and

“old” voices are heard more prominently. More and more farmers seem

ready for CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) and other schemes of

direct producer/consumer cooperation. The re-ruralization of the world,

which Vandana Shiva speaks about, is incompatible with capitalism (it is

intrinsically non-profitable), but can at the same time be seen as a

revitalization or resocialization of our cities. (Cf. New York City in

the year 2400 in the Manhattan project) More and more people understand

the concept of subsistence (kodu) as a practical way of organizing our

social metabolism.

As Vandana Shiva points out, our “north-western” lifestyle is only

possible for one out of seven billion people on this planet. The same

view is shared by Hans-Peter Gensichen who uses the term Armseligkeit

(an interesting German word, a combination of poverty and beatitude)

describing a new global way of life based on a consumption of resources

on the level of countries like Chile or Slovenia, sustaining “happiness”

with half of the GNP of the US or Switzerland. Global household politics

will be one of our next tasks, and it should be taken seriously.

Gensichen bases most of his evidence on the experience of East German

projects of local production, exchange and cooperation. Even the

newcomers to the capitalist utopia seem to have seen enough. However

Gensichen positions his proposals in a strictly global context.

Among the many initiatives that are being created at the moment, I want

to mention sole-freiburg.de (life and solidarity). Their basic axiom

sounds so simple, that it almost hurts: “We help each other, we

contribute things or services according to everybody’s possibilities for

the benefit of others. We do not keep book on what is given or

received.” Imagine how horrible this must sound in the ears of market

fetishists.

Even the “state” looks better now (not just because private capital

looks bad), especially in its municipal or regional aspects (tega and

sumi). There is no more talk of privatization at the moment, on the

contrary. The privatization of the local electric supply was voted down

in Zurich, a proposal to privatize the municipal catering system (for

schools, or “meals on wheels”) has no chance whatsoever. The tragedy of

privatization is giving way to the happy endings of the comedy of the

commons.

The actual state can be transformed and so become a ready and easy tool

of transition. Transition towns are emerging everywhere. Transition

states, territories, provinces or regions could be the next step, up to

a planetary transition “cooperative” of democratic states (asa). The

expansion of public services can provide existential security for

everybody and thus free us from the terrorism of waged work. As they

can’t we’ll help them devalue their capital.

I can see three existing forms of organization of the emergent commons:

a transformed state (feno), rural/urban subsistence (bolo), and an area

of cooperative enterprises. All these forms have a long history, are

based on inclusive, democratic structures and can function beyond the

law of value. At the same time, their constituency is functionally

different and will guarantee systemic stability.

I think the way ahead is getting clearer every day. At the same time,

watchfulness is essential. There is no automatic escalator into a better

future. Every step will require careful evaluation, collective

organization and autonomous institutions.

P.M. May 5, 2011

Introduction to the Second English Edition

“Apology,” A Decade Later

According to the Provisional Schedule in the first English printing

bolo’bolo we should now all be living happily in bolos, traveling around

the planet without credit cards or passports, enjoying hospitality

everywhere, working some, playing some, sleeping some and not worrying

about anything. Nation-states, armies, big companies, 9-to-5 jobs,

poverty, hunger, car traffic, environmental pollution, etc., should be

no more than dim memories of a past age of stupidity and mutual fear. No

such monsters as the USA, Russia or China should exist any more, but a

patchwork of intentional regions (sumi) of maybe ten million inhabitants

and the size of Pennsylvania, largely self-sufficient. Instead of

nations there should be criss-cross cooperation between these regions,

worldwide.

Now, if we look at the real year 1993, we couldn’t be farther off

schedule. Not only hasn’t the Planetary Work Machine (or economy —

state, private or mixed — as some prefer to call it) not dissolved, it’s

kicking and alive, killing to the left and to the right, imposing still

lower levels of misery. We are further away from any conceivable Utopia

than ever. Instead of paradise, 1991 brought us one of the most cynical

wars ever (or shall we call it a punitive expedition?) to ensure that

energy prices remain “reasonable” and under control. The Gulf War has

proved once more that the Planetary Work Machine is really one Machine,

not limited by nations, ideologies or property-systems. Energy, the

blood of the Machine, is too vital to play funny games. The divisions

(race, nation, wages, sex) are ours, not the Machine’s.

Sure, the three Deals (A, B, C) are still in crisis, and this crisis has

visibly deepened. In this respect, some of my predictions of 1983 turned

out quite correct. (You’re always right in predicting bad things, never

when doing the opposite.) Of course there are more than just three types

of deals between the Machine and us; reality is infinitely more complex.

Actually, the use of computers has allowed the Machine to create and

manage an “individual” deal for almost everybody. So the A, B, C deals

are to be taken as simplified models, roughly corresponding to the

amount of capital invested per worker (“organic composition,” as we

Marxists sometimes say).

So, a C-deal worker uses thousands of dollars, 10³, a B-worker from tens

to hundreds of thousands, 10^(4–5), a C-worker, millions, 10⁶ According

to their responsibilities (or risks for the Machine), qualifications,

wages, prestige and lifestyle are tuned. The same holds for political

systems (or procedures of legitimation): the higher the organic

composition in a given area is, the more “democracy” and “human rights”

you’re liable to get. You’re not going to frustrate workers with

dictators and random arrests, if they can ruin equipment worth millions

of dollars by just turning the “wrong” switch in a fit of “human error”…

(We should keep such business-like considerations in mind when we talk

about lofty ideals like freedom, democracy, rights and guarantees.)

Talking about deals in crisis, the most striking collapse in the decade

since I first wrote bolo’bolo has occurred in what I call the B-deal:

the classic industrial-worker deal, in certain areas managed in the form

of socialism. The concept of an average organic-composition deal with

“Taylorized” exploitation via relative surplus-value (productivity

linked to worker’s performance) seems to be definitely “out.” Mass

workers — thousands of people holding the same jobs and doing comparable

chores — have proved to be too strong to be submitted to increasing

levels of output. After having been a low-wage colony for A-deal

regions, Eastern Europe became a liability for the Machine.

Perestroika and other palliative operations of readjustment couldn’t

bring the workers back to real work. So bankruptcy or self-devaluation

is the only weapon left to liquidate a blocked situation. The new

strategy seems to consist of “special economic zones,” a form of A-deal

pockets within “bankrupt” B-deal areas, that could utilize the

accumulated cheap human capital (a Russian monthly wage corresponds to

$12 at the moment I write this) and infrastructure of socialism. (This

would be similar to the Japanese or Italian models, where the big

companies with their “guaranteed workers” feed on thousands of low-wage

sub-contractor firms.)

The dissolution of the classic B-deal doesn’t mean that industrial

production disappears or becomes unimportant. On the one side,

industrial production is robotized and computerized: no job is

comparable to another, and the link between physical work and actual

output is indirect. On the other hand, low technological work (including

cleaning, repairing and maintenance) is geographically or

organizationally separated from end-production and submitted to

conditions similar to what I call the C-deal (largely female, marginal

work). The B-deal — of medium-high organic composition in medium-large

production units paying medium “decent” wages to feed average

working-class families participating in a regular modern lifestyle — is

being dismantled as well in the West as in the East. While it’s called

Thatcherism or “de-industrialization” in the West and is treated as a

purely “economic” affair, it appears as a real “change of system” in the

East.

It seems that the B-deal will be pulverized between a few workers

joining the A-deal and many more falling back to the manifold miseries

of old and new C-deals. In the meantime B-workers are still there,

fighting in many forms, from Brazil to South Korea, from Poland to

China.

The current melt-down of socialism is analogous in many ways to the

Chernobyl accident of 1986. The reactor got essentially out of control,

because it was deprived of its cooling system. The crew was playing

frustrated macho-games and tried to run the reactor much below security

levels, in the same way you violate speed limits in a sports car. In the

same fashion, the socialist factory-state had no extra cooling system,

economy and politics being in the same basket. Any economic failure

became another blow to political legitimation, which in turn was

completely worn out by the mid-eighties. Unlike in the West — where you

can blame, alternately, politicians or the economy if there is a

recession or there isn’t enough money for social programs — all evils

concentrated on the one and same elite until the social reactor got out

of control. Seemingly solid states like East Germany, with a very

effective police apparatus, disintegrated miraculously over night. The

collapse of the regimes didn’t mean a collapse of the Machine anywhere

though, just a change of the type of management, a psychologically more

refined way of running it. The one thing we can learn from this

experience is, however, that if we are capable of undermining

(“substructing”) the Machine thoroughly in one place, we don’t have to

worry too much about police or military repression. The experiences of

Eastern Europe show that the concept of armed revolutionary struggle is

out-dated, ridiculous and unnecessary, at least in industrially advanced

areas. Social mass sabotage is much more effective.

At least as spectacular as the collapse of the B-deal is the failure of

any attempts to create “development” for the areas I summed up under the

C-deal (the planet’s South). In most parts of Africa, average incomes

went down during the eighties. Via IMF policies, repression and

starvation became more brutal everywhere. A new wave of epidemics like

cholera and AIDS was made possible by a complete neglect of medical and

social infrastructures. The ultimate collapse of the illusions of

development has spurred ever more desperate flows of emigration towards

Europe or within the South. The attack on the remaining possibilities of

subsistence farming has been engineered with droughts, civil war and

deportations. A “New Enclosure” of formerly communal land is under way,

driving farmers into cities and converting good lands into plantations

for cash crops (exportation) . In some regions the refusal of the C-deal

has grown into mass movements for the refusal of all deals of “Western

Civilization” as a whole. Some of these movements try to use ideological

expressions of former stages of the (patriarchal) Machine, and link

themselves to “Islamic fundamentalism.” It is apparent though, that

these movements really care little about Islam, and that they’re social

and not religious movements. Islam just stands for the concept of

“cultural identity” (“nima?”) that must still be found autonomously by

the movement. What we see is just a religiously-styled elite (mostly

trained in U. S. universities) trying to transform the fundamental

refusal into a source of energy for an “Islamic state” or a phantasmatic

“Islamic economy.” Iran is already in a final stage of this kind of

manipulation, and there are now the first “Islamic fundamentalist

revolts” against the Islamic state of the ayatollahs… The ferocity of

the U. S. attack against Saddam Hussein can be explained by the fact,

that he (undeservedly, of course) had become the champion of

“fundamentalist” refusals of all deals, from Indonesia to Morocco and

even Trinidad. The Gulf War was the first war waged explicitly against

all those who refuse deals… including the A-deal. And now there are

others….

(The fact that there are deals doesn’t mean that they were ever

accepted. They just represent forms of social armistice in certain

phases of struggle against the Machine as such.)

Even the “best” deal, offered to about ten percent (600 million persons)

of the Machine’s workers, the A-deal of modern consumer society, is no

longer what it used to be. Wages in the classic A-deal country, the

U.S.A., have gone down to 1957 equivalents, and since 1967 work-weeks

per year have risen from 43.9 to 47.1[1]. The Carter, Reagan and Bush

years smashed the guarantees of “The American Way of Life” for many

sectors of the old working-class, but also for the new middle-classes.

Even the yuppies see their expectations betrayed. Phenomena like

homelessness, permanent unemployment and the “new poverty,” as it’s

called in Europe (what’s “new” about it?), have become widespread in

A-areas. Even in Switzerland, real wages went down by 5% in 1990, and

sociologists found out that 15% of the population of this model A+

country live in poverty. Currently, wages are under heavy attack in

Western Europe, mainly through inflation and tax rises (Germany). The

bosses tell them to be happy about the end of “communism” (which never

existed) and to be ready to pay the price. A strange logic: “we” win and

get punished for it. After all, Eastern state-capitalism was one of

their ideas. The hidden refusal of work (work less and — if you can —

spend less) practiced by A-workers has thinned out profits. Complaints

about increasing “laziness” can be heard everywhere, even in

Switzerland. “Post-materialist” attitudes and behaviors are shared by

shadow “silent majorities” in European countries. Workers are evasive,

minimalist, have “other interests,” retire early, have numerous

“psychological” and “health” problems… and many more excuses not to be

productive.

This “hidden” strike has eroded the centers of the most advanced

capitalist production. Again one of the strategies of the counter-attack

is “bankruptcy.” Companies just close shop, all the money disappears

(including pension funds) and at the same time the state that is

expected to guarantee the guarantees declares itself to be in a “budget

crisis” and can’t pay either. Budget crises, cuts in social spendings,

massive lay-offs, wage-cuts, all are the common denominator of such

different situations as New York or Zurich. The task of the current

recession — to get rid of the “fat cats” and to get the lazy bums with

well-paid, part-time jobs jumping — can easily be seen in the “strange”

fact that no government is implementing particular anti-cyclical

policies. For the first time, there is no deficit spending to get the

economy running again; actually it’s the previous fake — “boom” that has

accumulated the biggest deficits ever. So there’s no money, no place to

go, and old guarantees go down the drain. Nothing is left between you

and “pure” capital.

Another big change in the functioning of the A-deal consists in the

geographical fragmentation of old homogenous A-deal areas. As I already

pointed out in 1983, all three deals are present everywhere. But there

used to be blocs or regions, like North America or Western Europe, with

a certain predominance of the A-deal. This antediluvian attempt —

created by Roosevelt and Stalin in Yalta — to divide the planetary

proletariat along geographical demarcation lines, has definitely been

undermined by the crisis of the respective deals on both sides. This

doesn’t mean that there will be fewer or less-pronounced divisions; the

end of the divisions would be the end of the machine. But what we see

now, more and more, is a kind of leopard-skin pattern of all the deals.

New York or Los Angeles resemble almost Third World cities, whereas the

center of Rio looks like a cleaner midtown Manhattan. The predominant

deal can differ from one neighborhood to the next. A-deal areas become

fortresses in a jungle of various C-deals and some B-deal leftovers. The

price the Machine had to pay to use the instrument of division called

“nation” (solidified in turn by “blocs”), a certain minimal homogeneity

of incomes, has obviously risen too high. There is no more national

economy, just multinational companies operating all over the planet,

wherever profits can be made the easiest. The “New World Order” is just

the predator’s dream of an unlimited hunting ground. The Gulf War was

not a national war, but an operation for the world economy as such. The

U.S. Army was just hired to do the job: a new type of planetary

Pinkertons. Living in an A-deal country guarantees less and less — you

can be as poor in the U. S. as in Brazil, or as rich in India as in

Switzerland.

The crisis and dispersion of the deals is transforming the planetary

functioning of the Machine. Instead of different bosses (or blocs) we’re

now confronted with purely anonymous systems of control and sanctions.

Be it called “free market,” “law” (with the U.S. “cops of the world” to

enforce it), “democracy” or “productivity,” power is exerted over us and

by “us” via manifold circuits of selection and the self-regulating

mechanisms for the allocation of goods. The typical pseudo-boss

structures of the nineties will be institutions like the IMF, the World

Bank, and certain UN agencies. There is nowhere to go to protest; nobody

seems in charge, and those who represent companies or states stand there

wringing their hands, blaming market forces or the deficits. Ideologists

announce the “end of history,” and in a certain sense, they’re right):

“their” history is ending, and we never needed one.

The new leopard-skin geometry of the deals would seem risky, if the

Machine couldn’t trust the achieved social atomization and all the

automated barriers of qualification, lifestyle, income, race and sex.

Living close together in the same cities and mingling on a daily basis,

the single workers behave like little spaceships, each on its individual

course. Not afraid of organizational short-circuits between these atoms,

the Machine can give them a kind of micro-autonomy, and dissipate

decision-making all over the pattern. No “ruling” is needed to be in

power. But “things” happen….

While there is no use to weep about the old deals, the new menu of deals

looks even less appetizing. There is no way back — we’re out in the open

and a ferocious wind blows. We must choose now if we want to duck and

hide in our precarious shelters, or if we use the wind for our purposes

— to fly kites or propel our sail boats. To the new geometry of the

Machine we can answer with a new proletarian geometry, taking advantage

of the new possibilities. With the collapse of socialism not only

ideological mystifications have vanished, but new contacts with hundreds

of millions of ex- B-workers have become possible. The migrations of

C-workers to the North bring numerous fresh encounters and cultural

exchanges.

The “end of history” and the fact that we all now face the same bosses

(or boss-mechanisms) can bring together workers of the most different

backgrounds, and can help to get rid of all the smokescreen illusions

about progress and politics. The next time — this time — we aren’t going

to play around with replacing (powerless) governments and tinkering with

legitimation and representation; we’re going to deal with the real

thing. Instead of waiting for the next recovery, we can build our own

circuits of survival. Why wait for the next job? Why not use our

creative potentials for ourselves? Must the East really wait for

economic help from the West? Can’t farmers and city-dwellers just

organize and create self-sufficient country or city communities?

The new migrations greatly facilitate what I called “dysco” (solidarity

and communication across deal-barriers). On cultural and neighborhood

levels, many initiatives have grown in the past years. It is exactly the

issue of “land” (housing, social spaces) that has brought together

workers of different deals. Land prices and therefore rents have been

used all over the planet to restructure territories, to push out

unproductive people, and to create the new cocoon-type housing

facilities for some A-workers (“gentrification”). But, even for them,

rents have become unbearable, and so some common activity is possible.

Not surprisingly, the Machine is trying to use all kinds of racist and

xenophobic resentments to block such dyscos. It has even unearthed the

most ridiculous nationalisms — especially in Eastern Europe — to spoil

the newly possible dysco parties. It tries to divert the struggle for

land from itself and pit workers against workers.

The distribution of different deals in the form of smaller pockets makes

the mechanism of the Machine more flexible, disperses risks of big

“accidents,” generally increases the “heat” and overall productivity.

While it tries to get away from many more “natural” limits (via genetic

engineering, cyborgs, virtual realities, fusion and/or solar energy) it

is still vulnerable. The ultimate “vision” of a sterile, immune

self-reproducing automaton living on decaying human and natural compost

— the A-deal Cyborg-Machine reducing the rest of the universe to mere

C-deal waste — is not yet real. But the road is open.

There are strategic possibilities for the new proletarian geometricians

to stop this automatopia from happening. For example, the Machine is

still dependent on petroleum, and vital sources of this basic energy

commodity lie exactly in areas where new “fundamentalist” movements are

virulent: in the Near and Middle East and the ex-U.S.S.R. Oil and land

will be the key words for the constructive forces of refusal

(“confusal?”) of the Machine. If metropolitan dyscos could directly

cooperate with the “fundamentalist” C-deal refusers in those areas, the

Machine could be slowly paralyzed, some usable wealth could be funnelled

to the South via the last petro-dollars, and the land left by the

retreating Machine be used for the production of life and communal

sovereignty. Sure, the Gulf War was a kind of preventive blow to such

thoughts. But there’s always another chance….

A common program for all the “confusers” — a hidden anti-economic agenda

— can be found in the struggles themselves. The words “proletarian

geometry” suggest a program: “proletarian” is derived from Latin proles,

meaning “children”; “geometry” contains gaia (“earth”) and meter

(“measure,” “middle”), but also “mother” (as in “metropolis”). The

“children of mother earth” claiming their right to live — what else

could it be about? The reason for the unreasonable behavior of workers

is (in Machine-language): better reproduction, higher “social costs” —

life itself?

In a certain way, our hidden program is therefore “matriarchal,” and

surely anti-patriarchal. This program is very old; it’s actually the

original program, the history of ancient struggles. New research

suggests that the beginning of the present patriarchal Machine is not

just lost in mythological mists, but that it started around 3000 B.C.,

as desperate tribes invaded formerly matriarchal civilizations.[2]

Correcting my sloppy remarks about the beginning of centralized

domination, it becomes clear that matriarchy created urban cultures of

high diversification, and without the tyrannies of the later “asiatic

mode of production.” The palaces of Chatal Hüyük (7000 B.C.) and Knossos

(ending 1400 B.C.) are vast, but not intimidatingly monumental; they

show no signs of fortifications, but express urban wealth and joy of

life. They prove that non-patriarchal cultures needn’t be dull, rural or

“happily” stagnant. They were in full technological and social

development (on another path of progress) when the patriarchal

“accident” happened. Centralized systems of command were also used in

matriarchal societies in times of emergency or natural catastrophe, as a

kind of exceptional crisis management. As soon as things went back to

normal, the center of power dissolved, and the regular procedures of

“slow” and “communal” rule resumed. Now it seems that around 3000 B.C. a

drought in Innerasia produced a prolonged period of stress and

migrations. For many peoples (later known as “Inda-Europeans”),

adaptation to the new climate wasn’t possible, so they started preying

on agricultural societies in Mesopotamia, India and Eurasia. This, in

turn, produced emergency rules in those societies and a process of

mutual “patriarchalization” that couldn’t be reversed — till now. So

what we’re dealing with at the moment is nothing else than a temporary

anomaly within the normal matriarchal course of human affairs. (When

Marx talks about “historic necessity,” he’s just rationalizing this

abnormal state of emergency: 8000 years of matriarchy versus 3000 years

of patriarchy.)

Actually, the feeling of being “pushed,” “mobilized” (including its

military sense), of being on constant “alert,” is omnipresent in our

everyday lives. Speaking of a matriarchal program, we must make sure not

to put matriarchy (or better, matri-anarchy) in symmetry with

patriarchy. It doesn’t imply another system based on biological

distinctions. Matriarchy means the predominance of “motherly” values and

structures. All those who help to create and reproduce life (including

men) shall have authority, and social structures shall be modelled upon

the needs of sustaining life. This type of authority will naturally be

much more easily accessible to women or mothers than today’s. It won’t

need apparatuses of enforcement and centralized bodies of control. What

I call bolos (large communistic households, as they were mentioned by

Engels) would be ideally compatible with matriarchy. Bolos (if large

enough) presuppose the dismantling of external social machines like

armies, states or big companies that are the backbones of patriarchal

domination. Deprived of this corset, men will just be human beings, free

to participate in everyday household life. They will be closer to

“their” children and will have the chance to be as “motherly” as the

(biological) mothers. Men will become as rational, logical and gifted

for mathematics as women are today. Their “natural” strength will be

much more appreciated than today, when they just sit hunched over their

PCs. Matriarchy doesn’t mean a specific lifestyle, there can be as many

matriarchies as you wish, for life always expresses diversity. The roles

of men and women can be articulated in infinite ways. (Thus there will

be no confusion with traditional or fascist notions of “heroic

motherhood” or “female gentlenes s .”) We all can be monsters or saints

— that’s not the point.

The matriarchal program (Islamic: umma?) is alive in the anti-economic

movements of “unreasonable” workers around the planet. No need to write

an updated Communist Manifesto. Against the New Enclosures it advocates

common use of land by those who work or live on it — “mother” earth

doesn’t like fences. There’s still enough land on this planet to feed

everybody — all we need is direct access of our households to it. But

the process of pollution, erosion and destruction of land by the Machine

is underway. Movements against the “new market economy” (in Eastern

Europe), “development” or the so-called “ecological industrial society”

express the conviction that there is immense wealth beyond the economy

of scarcity. There are vast potentials of social productivity that are

repressed by capitalist economy, because capital would lose control if

capital let it flow. To make scarcity plausible is therefore one of the

tactics of the Machine. Millions of tons of food are destroyed every

year, billions of dollars are wasted for the military, goods are wasted

through ineffective mass-distribution, hundreds of millions of workers

are kept unemployed; the faux frais of centralized systems are bigger

than their usable output.

The main job of the economy at the moment consists in preventing people

from doing something useful. Instead of economies of scale, there are

huge wastes of scale. There is an adequate material basis for all the

utopias we might wish — bolo’bolo is just one of the modest appetizers.

But of course the movement that is dismantling the Machine cannot just

be imagined as a linear accumulation of bolo (or similar) projects.

Single bolo projects are sometimes possible in privileged situations,

and could play a role as organizational or cultural centers within a

more general movement. It would be reactionary to picture them as

isolated islands of the future.

One of the immediate practical possibilities of using bolos could be

movements of appropriation of empty industrial areas. A rustbelt of

deserted or neglected industrial sites, warehouses, port facilities,

railroad areas, etc., stretches now from California to Detroit, from New

England to Old England, from Central and Eastern Europe into China and

even Japan (between 30° and 60° North). These areas are often close to

metropolitan centers, linked by near-planetary railroad tracks, and

thanks to a general real estate crisis (e.g., the Docklands in London)

realistically available. Why not try to develop a planetary chain of

bolo-like projects in the rustbelt in order to subvert the North from

inside and to attack its stranglehold on the South? Projects and

contacts within the rustbelt could certainly contribute to the above

mentioned proletarian geometry. (And we also need a cleaning-up

operation before we can start the new-old matriarchal era.)

If we’re talking about bolos today, we are implicitly trying to

understand the mechanisms of structural domination we’re subject to

right now. This becomes particularly clear when we consider the proposed

size of bolod (about 500 persons). Some critics have argued that this is

too big, and that communities of about 30–50 people would be more

practical, and also easier to realize instantly. Instead of aiming at

autarky, more cooperation between these mini-bolos and neighborhood or

citywide organisms should be favored. Now, 500 is certainly not a

magical figure, it just describes a size between 300 and 1000 people

depending on local conditions and traditions. Whereas communities of

50 people are clearly small, and necessarily dependent on supplementary

structures, units of 500 people are rather middle-sized, and can be at

least tactically self-sufficient. They are not just intentional

communities, but middle-sized enterprises. Under present conditions, it

is imaginable that they could be founded in the legal form of

cooperatives or even stock corporations. Their “product” would then

consist in reproducing and guaranteeing the living of their members

(“employees”). A lot of politics would take place inside such units;

they’re not just for providing intimacy. For that purpose bolos can be

sub-divided into those mini-bolos or any other communities (families,

kana, clans, etc.). The size of a 500-person extended household is vital

to ensure a whole series of economies of scale, of divisions of labor,

of internalizing otherwise economic functions. There is a qualitative

leap somewhere between 100 and 300 people. If you go below let’s say

300 persons, bartering or supply by exchange contracts become extremely

tiresome, because the amount of single shipments will be too small

compared to the organizational work needed to get them under way. (Ask

any supermarket manager!) Division of labor (washing, cooking, supply,

services, child-care, “material feminism,” etc.) is vital to make

self-management worthwhile, and to insure that community members will

benefit from their own gains of cooperation. It will also reduce

socially necessary labor. In order to sustain non-hierarchic processes

of management, a huge amount of communication work must to be done in

committees, so you need a big pool of fresh “managers” to replace

worn-out administrators. Small units tend to become “structurally”

dictatorial because of communicational stress. Furthermore, units of

only 50 people are socially unstable and cannot guarantee the welfare of

all their members for a lifetime. We would need state-like structures or

insurance companies to take care of this, and would end up with more

anonymous bureaucratic structures and more risks of structural

domination than now. The same holds for the direct exchange between

city-based bolos and their agricultural branches. It would be a big

waste of work and energy to link small farms to equally small

city-communities. Or we could renounce direct exchange and rely on

shops, food-conspiracies and other “anonymous” solutions that, however,

would not allow us to create a wholeness of cultural values, social life

and food production. (This, I think, is an important matriarchal feature

of big bolos.) Practical experience must show which size makes a

household really communistic; I just want to argue again strongly in

favor of the 500-person bolo. Of course there’s no limit to any type of

cooperation between bolos. But with big bolos the structural risks are

smaller, because there’s more basic sovereignty.

Other readers have asked questions like: why don’t people just get

together and live in bolos? Why is there no bolo movement? Why are

people even afraid of living in bolos? (I’m not speaking merely of the

term “bolo,” of course, which is entirely disposable.) Psychological

reasons have been brought forward: we’re so used to being taken care of

by big “mother” state (or economy), that we’d be afraid to be in the

open and on our own in bolos. (The fear is real: bolos are not just

resort hotels or neighborhood associations — they mean actual survival,

life or death.) We still tend to trust more those politicians and

economic leaders who have proven their complete irresponsibility time

and time again, still trust them more than ourselves and our own ability

to take things in our own hands. I guess that only the development of

movements, of self-education by doing, will be able to overcome these

“infantile” illusions. When the crisis of the deals gets more visible,

it will become clearer to more and more workers that there is no other

mother “out there.” Nevertheless, there are now a number of local

initiatives to create “bolos” of many different types and functions. But

as I pointed out above, the end of the Machine is not just

bolo-building, but the refusal of work in action. If some of the

practical proposals of bolo’bolo should help to strengthen the

self-confidence of these movements — namely that there is life beyond

economy — they are fulfilling their main purpose.

It appears that seemingly “utopian” proposals like bolo’bolo create more

confusion than they help to explain things. (The real “utopia” is

capitalism.) One of these is the idea that everybody should live in

bolos. It might be sufficient that 60%, 50% or 30% of people live in

such basic communities to break the fundamental power of the Machine.

Around this core many other “systems” — singles, families, capitalisms,

socialisms of different kinds, small states, feudalistic, asiatic or

other modes of production, traditional tribes, etc. might find more

space to unfold than today. Once the stranglehold of the centers of the

Machine — in North America, Europe and Japan — is broken (when history

is really ended), even earlier stages in the development of the Machine

cannot be dangerous any more. Once you get rid of (enforced) progress,

uniformity in the levels of productivity becomes obsolete. Different

ages and epochs can co-exist. Even truly free-market economies of

partners of comparable starting positions could emerge in some odd

places, and thereby realize the old liberal utopia for the first time in

history. All these oddities are no temptations for a strong core

structure built on self-sufficiency. What we have in mind is not the

“next stage,” but a shortcut across country.

A number of readers of bolo’bolo have been confused or irritated by the

ironical or macabre tone of some passages. Some of the more practical

suggestions are indeed not to be taken literally (namely about ibu,

taku, nugo, yaka). They’re more illustrations than instructions.

Sometimes it was just the dusty genre “utopia” that provoked me to make

irreverent jokes. But of course, I’m serious. And you can be as serious

— or not — as you wish.

As some necessary adaptations are being made in this apology, I leave

this present printing of the text of bolo’bolo in its original form

(1983) and trust the reader to make further adjustments and to interpret

the text according to the author’s basic intentions….

I want to seize the opportunity of this “apology” for the English

reprinting (I am truly sorry) to thank all disappointed boloists and all

known and unknown conspirators on all continents for their help in

translating, publishing and circulating bolo’bolo. In recent years it

has appeared in the most unexpected places and social circles. On a

modest scale bolo’bolo seems to have become a kind of passport for many

members of the world-wide anti-economy league. Originally published in

1983 in German, bolo’bolo has been translated into French, Italian,

Dutch, Portuguese and Russian. Parts of it were published in Japanese

and Chinese. Most of this work was volunteered, and “profitable”

versions (like the German one, with six printings) have helped to pay

for strictly deficit ventures (like the Russian translation). Further

translations are encouraged — just get in touch with Autonomedia. Fresh

predictions about the end of the temporary patriarchal anomaly are not

in order. But what about a rendezvous in the year 2001, to dance on the

ruins of the Planetary Work Machine? Just send your suggestions for

date, place and tunes to Autonomedia.

P.M.

1^(st) May 1993

(Brasilian folk song)

A Big Hang-Over

Life on this planet isn’t as agreeable as it could be. Something

obviously went wrong on spaceship Earth, but what? Maybe a fundamental

mistake when nature (or whoever it was) came up with the idea “Man.” Why

should an animal walk on two feet and start thinking? It seems we

haven’t got much of a choice about that, though; we’ve got to cope with

this error of nature, with ourselves. Mistakes are made in order to

learn from them.

In prehistoric times our deal seems to have been not so bad. During the

Old Stone Age (50,000 years ago) we were only few, food (game and

plants) was abundant, and survival required only little working time and

moderate efforts. To collect roots, nuts fruits or berries (don’t forget

mushrooms) and to kill (or easier still, trap) rabbits, kangaroos, fish,

birds or deer, we spent about two or three hours a day. In our camps we

shared meat and vegetables and enjoyed the rest of the time sleeping,

dreaming, bathing, making love or telling stories. Some of us took to

painting cave walls, carving bones or sticks, inventing new traps or

songs. We used to roam about the country in gangs of 25 or so, with as

little baggage and property as possible. We preferred the mildest

climates, like Africa’s, and there was no “civilization” to push us away

into deserts, tundras, or mountains. The Old Stone Age must have been a

good deal — if we can trust the recent anthropological findings. That’s

the reason we stuck it out for several thousands of years — a long and

happy period, compared to the 200 years of the present industrial

nightmare.

Then somebody must have started playing around with seeds and plants and

invented agriculture. It seemed to be a good idea: we didn’t have to

walk far away to get vegetables any more. But life became more

complicated, and toilsome. We had to stay in the same place for at least

several months, keep the seeds for the next crop, plan and organize work

on the fields. The harvest also had to be defended against our nomadic

hunter-gatherer cousins, who kept insisting that everything belonged to

everybody. Conflicts between farmers, hunters and cattle-breeders arose.

We had to explain to others that we had “worked” to accumulate our

provisions, and they didn’t even have a word for “work.” With planning,

withholding of food, defense, fences, organization and the necessity of

self-discipline we opened the door to specialized social organisms like

priesthoods, chiefs, armies. We created fertility religions with rituals

in order to keep ourselves convinced of our newly chosen lifestyle. The

temptation to return to the free life of gatherer-hunters must always

have been a threat. Whether it was patriarchate or matriarchate, we were

on the road to statehood (cf. footnote [3]).

With the rise of the ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia, India, China

and Egypt, the equilibrium between man and natural resources was

definitely ruined. The future break-down of our spaceship was

programmed. Centralized organisms developed their own dynamics; we

became the victims of our own creations. Instead of the two hours per

day, we worked ten hours and more, on the fields and construction

grounds of the pharaohs and caesars. We died in their wars, were

deported as slaves when they needed us for that. Those who tried to

return to their former freedom were tortured, mutilated, killed.

With the start of industrialization, things were no better. To crush the

peasant rebellions and he growing independence of craftsmen in the

towns, they introduced the factory system. Instead of foremen and whips,

they used machines. They dictated to us our work rhythms, punished us

automatically with accidents, kept us under control in huge halls. Once

again “progress” meant working more and more under still more murderous

conditions. From 1440 hours per year in 1300 work rose to 3650 hours in

1850 — in 1987 it was at 2152 and is rising[4]. The whole society and

the whole planet was turned into one big Work Machine. And this Work

Machine was simultaneously a War Machine for anybody — outside or inside

— who dared oppose it. War became industrial, just like work; indeed,

peace and work have never been compatible. You can’t accept to be

destroyed by work and prevent the same machine from killing others. You

can’t refuse your own freedom and not threaten the freedom of others.

War became as absolute as Work.

The early Work Machine produced strong illusions of a “better future”.

After all, if the present was so miserable, the future must be better.

Even the working-class organizations became convinced that

industrialization would lay the basis for a society of more freedom,

more free time, more pleasures. Utopians, socialists and communists

believed in industry. Marx thought that with its help man would be able

to hunt, make poetry, enjoy life again. (Why the big detour?) Lenin and

Stalin, Castro and Mao, and all the others demanded More Sacrifice to

build the new society. But even socialism only turned out to be another

trick of the Work Machine, extending its power to areas where private

capital couldn’t or wouldn’t go. The Work Machine doesn’t care if it is

managed by transnational corporations or state bureaucracies, its goal

is the same everywhere: steal our time to produce steel.

The industrial Work and War Machine has definitely ruined our spaceship

and its predictable future: the furniture (jungles, woods, lakes, seas)

is torn to shreds; our playmates (whales, turtles, tigers, eagles) have

been exterminated or endangered; the air (smog, acid rain, industrial

waste) stinks and has lost all sense of balance; the pantries (fossil

fuels, coal, metals) are being emptied; complete self-destruction

(nuclear holocaust) is being prepared for. We aren’t even able to feed

all the passengers of this wretched vessel. We’ve been made so nervous

and irritable that we’re ready for the worst kind of nationalist, racial

or religious wars. For many of us, nuclear holocaust isn’t any longer a

threat, but rather a welcome deliverance from fear, boredom, oppression

and drudgery.

Three thousand years of civilization and 200 years of accelerated

industrial progress have left us with a terrible hang-over. “Economy”

has become a goal in itself, and we’re about to be swallowed by it. This

hotel terrorizes its guests. Even when we’re guests and hosts at the

same time.

The Planetary Work Machine

The name of the monster that we have let grow and that keeps our planet

in its grips is: The Planetary Work Machine. If we want to transform our

spaceship into an agreeable place again, we’ve got to dismantle this

Machine, repair the damage it has done, and come to some basic

agreements on a new start. So, our first question must be: how does the

Planetary Work Machine manage to control us? How is it organized? What

are its mechanisms and how can they be destroyed?

It is a Planetary Machine: it eats in Africa, digests in Asia, and shits

in Europe. It is planned and regulated by international companies, the

banking system, the circuit of fuels, raw materials and other goods.

There are a lot of illusions about nations, states, blocs, first,

Second, Third or Fourth Worlds — but these are only minor subdivisions,

parts of the same machinery. Of course there are distinct wheels and

transmissions that exert pressure, tensions, frictions on each other.

The Machine is built on its inner contradictions: workers/capital;

private capital/state capital (capitalism/socialism);

development/underdevelopment; misery/waste; war/peace; women/men; etc.

The Machine is not a homogenous structure; it uses its internal

contradictions to expand its control and to refine its instruments.

Unlike fascist or theocratic systems or like in Orwell’s 1984, the Work

Machine permits a “sane” level of resistance, unrest, provocation and

rebellion. It digests unions, radical parties, protest movements,

demonstrations and democratic changes of regimes. If democracy doesn’t

function, it uses dictatorship. If its legitimation is in crisis, it has

prisons, torture and camps in reserve. All these modalities are not

essential for understanding the function of the Machine.

The principle that governs all activities of the Machine is the economy.

But what is economy? Impersonal, indirect exchange of crystallized

life-time. You spend your time to produce some part, which is used by

somebody else you don’t know to assemble some device that is in turn

bought by somebody else you don’t know for goals also unknown to you.

The circuit of these scraps of life is regulated according to the

working time that has been invested in its raw materials, its

production, and in you. The means of measurement is money. Those who

produce and exchange have no control over their common product, and so

it can happen that rebellious workers are shot with the exact guns they

have helped to produce. Every piece of merchandise is a weapon against

us, every supermarket an arsenal, every factory a battleground. This is

the machanism of the Work Machine: split society into isolated

individuals, blackmail them separately with wages or violence, use their

working time according to its plans. Economy means: expansion of control

by the Machine over its parts, making the parts more and more dependent

on the Machine itself.

We are all parts of the Planetary Work Machine — we are the machine. We

represent it against each other. Whether we’re developed or not, waged

or not, whether we work alone or as employees — we serve its purpose.

Where there is no industry, we “produce” virtual workers to export to

industrial zones. Africa has produced slaves for the Americas, Turkey

produces workers for Germany, Pakistan for Kuwait, Ghana for Nigeria,

Morocco for France, Mexico for the U.S. Untouched areas can be used as

scenery for the international tourist business: Indians on reservations,

Polynesians, Balinese, aborigines. Those who try to get out of the

Machine fulfill the function of picturesque “outsiders” (bums, hippies,

yogis). As long as the Machine exists, we’re inside it. It has destroyed

or mutilated almost all traditional societies or driven the into

demoralizing defensive situations. If you try to retreat to a “deserted”

valley in order to live quietly on a bit of subsistence farming, you can

be sure you’ll be found by a tax collector, somebody working for the

local draft board, or by the police. With its tentacles, the Machine can

reach virtually every place on this planet within just a few hours. Not

even in the remotest parts of the Gobi Desert can you be assured of an

unobserved shit.

The Three Essentials Elements of the Machine

Examining the Machine more closely, we can distinguish three essential

functions, three components of the international work force, and three

“deals” the Machine offers to different fractions of us. These three

functions can be characterized like this:

Information: planning, design, guidance, management, science,

communication, politics, the production of ideas, ideologies, religions,

art, etc.; the collective brain and nerve-system of the Machine.

Production: industrial and agricultural production of goods, execution

of plans, fragmented work, circulation of energy.

Reproduction: production and maintenance of A, B, and C workers,

making children, education, housework, services, entertainment, sex,

recreation, medical care, etc.

All these three functions are essential for the functioning of the

Machine. If one of them fails, it will sooner or later be paralyzed.

Around these three functions, the Machine has created three types of

workers to perform them. They’re divided by their wage levels,

privileges, education, social status, etc.

Technical/Intellectual Workers in advanced (Western) industrial

countries: highly qualified, mostly white, male, and well paid. A good

example would be computer engineers.

Agro/Industrial Workers and employees in not yet “de-industrialized”

areas, in “threshhold” countries, socialist countries: modestly or

miserably paid, male or female, with wide-ranging qualifications. For

example, automobile assembly workers, electronics assembly workers

(female).

Fluctuant Workers, oscillating between small agricultural and seasonal

jobs, service workers, housewives, the unemployed, criminals, petty

hustlers, those without regular income. Mostly women and non-whites in

metropolitan slums or in the Third World, these people frequently live

at the edge of starvation.

All these types of workers are present in all parts of the world, just

in different proportions. Nevertheless, it’s possible to distinguish

three zones with a typically high proportion of the respective type of

workers:

A Workers in advanced industrial (Western) countries, in the U.S.,

Europe, Japan.

B Workers in socialist countries or the newly industrializing

countries, in the USSR, Poland, Taiwan, etc.

C Workers in the Third World, agricultural or “underdeveloped” areas

in Africa, Asia, and South America, and in urban slums everywhere.

The “Three Worlds” are present everywhere. In New York City there are

neighborhoods that can be considered as part of the Third World. In

Brasil there are major industrial zones. In socialist countries there

are stong A type elements. But there is still a pronounced difference

between the United States and Bolivia, between Sweden and Laos, and so

on.

The power of the Machine, its control mechanism, is based on playing off

the different types of workers against each other. High wages and

privileges are not granted because the Machine has a special desire for

a certain kind of particular worker. Social stratification is used for

the maintenance of the whole system. The three types of workers learn to

be afraid of each other. They’re kept divided by prejudices, racism,

jealousy, political ideologies, economic interests. The A and B workers

are afraid of losing their higher standard of living, their cars, their

houses, their jobs. At the same time, they continually complain about

stress and anxiety, and envy the comparatively idle C workers. C workers

in turn dream of fancy consumer goods, stable jobs, and what they see as

the easy life. All these divisions are exploited in various ways by the

Machine.

The Machine doesn’t even need anymore a special ruling class to maintain

its power. Private capitalists, the bourgeoisie, aristocrats, all the

chiefs are mere left-overs, without any decisive influence on the

material execution of power. The machine can do without capitalists and

owners, as the examples of the socialist states and state enterprises in

the West demonstrate. These relatively rare fat cats are not the real

problem. The truly oppressive organs of the Machine are all controlled

by just other workers: cops, soldiers, bureaucrats. We’re always

confronted with convenient metamorphoses of our own kind.

The Planetary Work Machine is a machinery consisting of people put up

against each other; we all guarantee its functioning. So an early

question is: why do we put up with it? Why do we accept to live a kind

of life we obviously don’t like? What are the advantages that make us

endure our discontent?

Three Deals in Crisis

The contradictions that make the Machine move are also internal

contradictions for every worker — they’re our contradictions. Of course,

the Machine “knows” that we don’t like this life, and that it is not

sufficient just to oppress our wishes. If it were just based on

represssion, productivity would be low and the costs of supervision too

high. That’s why slavery was abolished. In reality, one half of us

accepts the Machine’s deal and the other half is in revolt against it.

The Machine has indeed got something to offer. We give it a part of our

lifetimes, but not all. In turn, it gives us a certain amount of goods,

but not exactly as much as we want and not exactly what we want. Every

type of worker has its own deal, and every worker makes his or her own

little extrapdeal, depending on particular job and specific situation.

As everyone thinks he or she is better off than somebody else (there’s

always somebody worse off), everybody sticks to his or her own deal,

distrusting all changes. So the inner inertia of the Machine protects it

against reform and revolution alike.

Only if a deal has become too unequal can dissatisfaction and readiness

to change the situation arise. The present crisis, which is visible

mainly on the economic level, is caused by the fact that all deals the

Machine has to offer have become unacceptable. A, B, and C workers alike

have protested recently, each in their own ways, against their

respective deals. Not only the poor, but also the rich, are

dissatisfied. The Machine is finally losing its perspective. The

machanism of internal division and mutual repulsion is collapsing.

Repulsion is turning back on the Machine itself.

The A Deal: Disappointed at Consumer Society

What makes up the A Deal? Steaks, good stereos, surfing, Chivas Regal,

Tai—Chi, Acapulco, Nouvelle Cuisine, coke, skiing, exclusive discos,

Alfa Romeos. Is this the Machine’s best offer?

But what about those mornings while commuting? That sudden rush of

angst, disgust, despair? We try not to face that strange void, but in

unoccupied moments between job and consuming, while we are waiting, we

realize that time just isn’t ours. The Machine is duly afraid of those

moments. So are we. So we’re always kept under tension, kept busy, kept

looking forward toward something. Hope itself keeps us in line. In the

morning we think of the evening, during the week we dream of the

week-end, we sustain everyday life by planning the next vacation from

it. In this way we’re immunized agasinst reality, numbed against the

loss of our energies.

The A Deal hasn’t become foul (or better: distinctly fouler) because the

quantity or variety of consumer goods is lacking. Mass production has

levelled out their quality, and the fascination of their “newness” has

definitely disappeared. Meat has become somehow tasteless, vegetables

have grown watery, milk has been transformed into just processed white

liquid. TV is deadly dull, driving is no longer pleasurable,

neighborhoods are either loud and crowded and unsafe or deserted and

unsafe. At the same time, the really good things, like nature,

traditions, social relations, cultural identities, intact urban

environments, are destroyed. In spite of this huge flood of goods, the

quality of life plummets. Our life has been standardized, rationalized,

anonymized. They track down and steal from us every unoccupied second,

every unused square foot. They offer us — some of us — quick vacations

in exotic places thousands of miles away, but in our everyday lives our

maneuvering room gets smaller and smaller.

Also for A workers, work still remains work: loss of energies, stress,

nervous tension, ulcers, heart attacks, deadlines, hysterical

competition, alcoholism, hierarchical control and abuse. No consumer

goods can fill up the holes made by work. Passivity, isolation, inertia,

emptiness: these are not cured by new electronics in the apartment,

frenzied travel, meditation/relaxation workshops, creativity courses,

zipless fucks, pyramid power or drugs. The A Deal is poison; its revenge

comes in depression, cancer, allergies, addiction, mental troubles and

suicide. Under the perfect make-up, behind the facade of the “affluent

society,” there’s only new forms of human misery.

A lot of thus “privileged” A workers flee to the countryside, take

refuge in sects, try to cheat the Machine with magic, hypnosis, heroin,

oriental religions or other illusions of secret power. Desparately they

try to get some structure, meaning, and sense back into their lives. But

sooner or later the Machine catches its refugees and transforms exactly

their forms of rebellion into a new impetus of its own development.

“Sense” soon means business sense.

Of course, the A Deal doesn’t only mean misery. The A Workers have

indeed got some undeniable privileges. As a group they’ve got access to

all the goods, all the information, all the plans and creative

possibilities of the Machine. The A workers have the chance to use this

wealth for themselves, and even against the goals of the Machine, but if

they act only as A workers, their rebellion is always partial and

defensive. The Machine learns quickly. Sectorial resistance always means

defeat.

The B Deal: Frustrated by Socialism

The B Deal is the classic industry/worker/state deal. The “positive”

aspects of this deal (from the workers’ point of view) are guaranteed

jobs, guaranteed incomes, social security. We can call this deal

“socialism” beacuse it occurs in its purest form in socialist or

communist countries. But the B Deal also exists in many different

versions in private-capitalist countries (Sweden, Great Britain, France,

even in the U.S.A.).

At the center of the B Deal there’s The State. Compared to the anonymous

dictatorship of the market and money, a centralized state does seem able

to give us more security. It seems to represent society (i.e., us) and

the general interest, and through its mediation many B workers consider

themselves their own bosses. Since the State has assumed essential

functions everywhere (pensions, health services, social security,

police), it seems to be indispensable, and any attack against it easily

looks like suicide. But the State is really just another face of the

Machine, not its abolition. Like the market, it constitutes its

anonymity by means of massification and isolation, but in this case it’s

The Party (or parties), bureaucracy, the adminstrative apparatus, that

fulfills this task. (In this context, we’re not talking about democracy

or dictatorship. A socialist state could in fact be perfectly

democratic. There’s no intrinsic reason why socialism even in the USSR

shouldn’t become democratic one day. The form of the state itself,

though, always means dictatorship; it’s just a question of degree how

democratically its legitimation is organized.)

We face the State (“our” state) as powerless individuals, provided with

“guarantees” which are just pieces of paper and do not establish any

form of direct social control. We’re alone, and our dependence upon

state-bureaucracy is just an expression of our real weakness. In periods

of crisis, some good friends are much more important than our

social-security cards or our savings accounts. The State means fake

security.

In the socialist countries, where the B Deal exists in its purer form,

there remains the same system of constraint — by wage and by work as is

found in the West. We all still work for the same economic goals.

Something like a “socialist” lifestlye, for which accepting some

sacrifices might make sense, has emerged nowhere; nothing like that is

even planned. Socialist countries still use the same motivation systems

as in the West: modern industrial society, “Western” consumer society,

cars, TV sets, individual apartments, the nuclear family, summer

cottages, discos, Coca-Cola, designer jeans, etc. As the level of

productivity of these countries remains relatively low, these goals can

be only partially reached. The B Deal is particularly frustrating, since

it pretends to realize consumer ideals it is far from able to fulfill.

But of course socialism doesn’t mean only frustration. It does have real

advantages. Its productivity is low because the workers there exert a

relatively high level of control over working rhythms, working

conditions and quality standards. Since there’s no risk of unemployment

and firing is difficult, the B workers can take it relatively easy.

Factories are over-staffed, sabotage is an everyday event, absenteeism

for shopping, alcoholism, black-market entrepreneurism and other illegal

businesses are wide-spread. B Deal workers are also officially

encouraged to take it easier, since there are not enough consumer goods

to go around, hence little incentive to work harder. Thus the circle of

under-productivity is closed. The misery of this system is visible in a

profound demoralization, in a mixture of alcoholism, boredom, family

feuds, ass-kissing careerism.

As the socialist countries become ever-more integrated into the world

market, underproductivity leads to catastrophic consequences; B Deal

countries can only sell their products by dumping them at below-market

prices, so B workers are actually exploited in low-wage-industrial

colonies. The few useful goods produced flow right to the West; their

continuing absence in their own countries are an additional reason for

B worker anger and frustration.

The recent events in Poland have shown that more and more B workers are

refusing the socialist deal. Understandably, there are great illusions

about consumer society and about the possibility of reaching it through

state-economic means. (Lech Walesa, for example, was fascinated by the

Japanese model.) A lot of people in socialist countries (for example,

East Germany) are beginning to realize that high-productivity consumer

society is just another type of misery, and certainly no way out. Both

the Western and the Socialist illusions are about to collapse. The real

choice isn’t between capitalism and socialism — both altenatives are

offered by the one and same Machine. Rather a new “solidarity” will be

needed, not to build a better industrial society and to realize the

affluent universal socialist consumer family, but to tie direct

relations of material exchange between farmers and city-dwellers, to get

free from big industry and state. The B workers alone will not be able

to accomplish this.

The C Deal: The Development of Misery

Before the industrial Work Machine colonized the actual Third World,

there was poverty. “Poverty”: that means that people possessed few

material goods and had no money, though they still got enough to eat and

eveything they needed for that way of life was available. “Wealth” was

originally “software”. Wealth was not determined by things and

quantities, but by forms: myths, festivals, fairy tales, manners,

eroticism, language, music, dance, theater, etc. (It’s also evident that

the way “material” pleasures are perceived is determined by cultural

traditions and conceptions.) The Work Machine has destroyed most of the

wealth aspects of this “poverty,” and has left misery in its place.

When the money economy hits poverty, the result is the development of

misery, maybe even just “development”. Development can be colonialist,

independent (managed by indigenous elites or bureaucracies), socialist

(state-capitalist), private capitalist, or some mix of these. The

result, however, is always the same: loss of local food resources (cash

crops replace subsistance agriculture), black-mailing on the world

market (terms of trade, productivity gaps, “loans”), exploitation,

repression, civil wars among rival ruling cliques, military

dictatorships, intervention by the super-powers, dependence, torture,

massacres, deportation, disappearances, famine.

The central element of the C Deal is direct violence. The Work Machine

deploys its mechanisms of control openly and without any inhibitions.

The ruling cliques have the task of building up functioning, centralized

states, and for that reason all tribal, traditionalist, autonomist,

“backward” and “reactionary” tendencies and movements must be crushed.

The often absurd territorial boundaries they’ve inherited from the

colonial powers have to be transformed into “modern” national states.

The Planetary Work Machine cannot do without well-defined, normalized

and stable parts. That is the sense of the actual “adjustments” in the

Third World, and for that goal millions have to die or are deported.

National independence has not brought the end of misery and

exploitation. It has only adjusted the old colonial system to the new

requirements of the Work Machine. Colonialism wasn’t efficient enough.

The Machine needed national masks, promises of progress and

modernization to get the temporary consent of the C workers. In spite of

the subjective good-will of many elites (e.g., N’Krumah, Nyerere, etc.),

development has only prepared the ground for a new attack by the Work

Machine, has demoralized and disillusioned the C masses.

For the C workers, the family is at the center of their deal, eventually

the clan, the village or the tribe. C workers cannot rely on the money

economy, since waged work is scarce and miserably paid. The State isn’t

able to grant any social guarantees. So the family is the only form for

even minimal social security. Yet, the family itself has an ambiguous

character: it provides safety amidst ups and downs, but at the same time

it is also another instrument of repression and dependence. That’s true

for the C workers all over the world, even in industrialized countries

(especially so for women). The Work Machine destroys family traditions,

and exploits them at the same time. The family yields a lot of unpaid

work (especially by women); the family produces cheap labor for unstable

jobs. The family is the place of work for the C worker.

The C workers in developing countries find themselves in an enervating

situation: they’re called upon to give up the old (family, village), but

the new can’t yet give them a sufficient means of survival. So we come

to the cities and have to live in slums. We hear of new consumer goods,

but we can’t earn enough to buy them. Simultaneously our villages and

their agricultural bases decay, and become manipulated, corrupted and

abused by the ruling caste. At least the C Deal has the advantage of

relative lack of restraint in everyday life, and few new

responsibilities; we aren’t tied to jobs or to the State, we’re not

blackmailed with long-term guarantees (pensions, etc.), we can take

advantage of any opportunities right on the spot.

In this regard, we’ve still got some of the left—over freedoms of the

old hunter-gatherers. Changes can easily be put into action, and the

possibility of “going home again” to the village (or what’s left of it)

is a real security that A and B workers just don’t have. This basic

freedom is at the same time a burden, since everyday means an entirely

new challenge, life is never safe, food has become uncertain, and risks

are always high. Criminal bands, political cliques, quick profiteers

exploit this fact and easily recruit hustlers, pushers, and other

mercenaries.

In spite of the endless commercial advertizing and development

propaganda, more and more C workers are realizing that the proposed

consumer society will always remain a fata morgana, at best a reward

only to the upper ten percent for their services to the Machine.

Capitalist and socialist models have failed, and the village is no

longer a practical alternative. As long as there is only this choice

between different styles of misery, there’s no way out for the

C workers. On the other side, they’ve got the best chances for a new way

of life based on self-sufficiency, since industrial and state structures

are growing very weak, and many problems (like energy, shelter, even

food) are obviously much easier to solve locally than in metropolitan

areas. But if the C workers as a class try to go back to their villages

before the Planetary Work Machine has been dismantled everywhere else,

too, they’ll be doubly cheated. The solution is global, or it is not at

all.

The End of Realpolitik

Misery in the Third World, frustration in the socialist countries,

deception in the West: the main dynamics of the Machine are actually

reciprocal discontent and the logic of the lesser evil. What can we do?

Reformist politicians propose to tinker with the Machine, trying to make

it more humane and agreeable by using its own mechanisms. Political

realism tells us to proceed by little steps. Thusly, the present

micro-electronic revolution is supposed to give us the means for

reforms. Misery shall be transformed into mobilization, frustration into

activism, and disappointment shall be the basis of a change of

consciousness. Some of the reformist proposals sound quite good: the

twenty-hour work week, the equal distribution of work on eveyone, the

guaranteed minimum income or negative income tax, the elimination of

unemployment, the use of free time for self-management in towns and

neighborhoods, utual self—help, decentralized self-administration in

enterprises and neighborhoods, the creation of an “autonomous” sector

with low-productivity small-enterprise, investments in middle and soft

technologies (also for the Third World), the reduction of private

traffic, the conservation of non-renewable energy, no nukes, investment

in solar, public transportation systems, less animal protein in our

diets, more self-sufficiency for the Third World, the recycling of raw

materials, global disarmament, etc. These proposals are reasonable, even

realizable, and certainly not extravagances. They form more-or-less the

official or secret program of the alternativist-socialist—green-pacifist

movements in Western Europe, the United States, and other countries.

Should many of these reforms be realized, the Work Machine would look

much more bearable. But even these “radical” reform programs only imply

a new adjustment to the Machine, not its demise. As long as the Machine

itself (the hard, “heteronomous” sector) exists, self-management and

“autonomy” can only serve as a kind of recreational area for the repair

of exhausted workers. And who can prevent that you won’t get just as

ruined in a 20-hour work week as you’ve been in 40? As long as this

monster isn’t pushed into space, it’ll continue to devour us.

What’s more, the political system is designed to block such proposals,

or convert reforms into a new impulse for the further development of the

Machine. The best illustration for this fact are the electoral politics

of reformist parties. As soon as the Left gets the power (take a look at

France, Greece, Spain, Bolivia, etc.) it gets entangled in the jungle of

“realities” and economic nec-cessities and has no choice but to enforce

precisely those austerity programs it attacked when the Right was in

charge. Instead of Giscard it’s Mitterand who sends the police against

striking workers. Instead of Reagan it’s Mondale who campaigns against

budget deficits. Socialists have always been good police. The “recovery

of the economy” (i.e., the Work Machine) is the basis for every national

politics; reforms always have to prove that they encourage investment,

create jobs, increase productivity, etc. The more the “new movements”

enter Realpolitik (like the Greens in Germany), the more they enter into

the logic of “healthy economy,” or else they disappear. Besides

destroying illusions, increasing resignation, developing general apathy,

reformist politics doesn’t achieve anything. The Work Machine is

planetary. All its parts are interconnected. Any national reformist

policy just makes for harder international competition, playing off the

workers of one country against those of another, perfecting the control

over all.

It is exactly this experience with Realpoliticians and reformers that

have led more and more voters to support neo-conservative politicians

like Reagan, Thatcher, or Kohl. The most cynical representatives of the

logic of economy are now preferred to leftist tinkerers. The

self-confidence factor of the Machine has grown shaky. Nobody dares

anymore to believe fully in its future, but everybody still clings to

it. The fear of experiments has outgrown the belief in demagogical

promises. Why reform a system that’s doomed, anyway? Why not try to

enjoy the few last positive aspects of the old personal or national

deals with the Machine? Why not put in charge positive, confident,

conservative politicians? The ones who don’t bother to promise to solve

problems like unemployment, hunger, pollution, nuclear arms races.

They’re not elected to solve problems of this sort, but to represent

continuity. For the “recovery”, only a little bit of calm, stability,

positive rhetoric is needed: the security to cash in on profits made by

present investments. Under these conditions, any recovery will be much

more terrible than the “crisis” is. Nobody really has to believe in

Reagan or Kohl, just keep smiling along with them, forgetting about

worries or doubts. The Work Machine, in a situation like the present,

supports doubts very badly, and with the neo-conservative regimes you’re

at least left alone until the end of the next “recovery” or catastrophe.

Aside from agitation, bad moods and remorse, the Left has nothing

additional to offer. Realpolitik is hardly realistic any more, since

reality is now at a turning point.

All or Nothing At All

The Planetary Work Machine is omnipresent; it can’t be stopped by

politicians. So will the Machine be our destiny, until we die of heart

disease or cancer at 65 or 71? Will this have been Our Life? Have we

imagined it like this? Is ironical resignation the only way out, hiding

from ourselves our deceptions for the few rushing years we’ve got left?

Maybe everything’s really okay, and we’re just being over-dramatic?

Let’s not fool ourselves. Even if we mobilize all our spirit of

sacrifice, all of our courage, we can achieve not a thing. The Machine

is perfectly equipped against political kamikazes, as the fate of the

Red Army Faction, the Red Brigades, the Monteneros and others has shown.

It can coexist with armed resistance, even transform that energy into a

motor for its own perfection. Our attitude isn’t a moral problem, not

for us, much less for the Machine.

Whether we kill ourselves, whether we sell out in our own special deals,

find an opening or a refuge, win the lottery or throw Molotov cocktails,

join the Sparts or the Bhagwan, scratch our ears or run amok: we’re

finished. This reality offers us nothing. Opportunism does not pay off.

Careers are bad risks; they cause cancer, ulcers, psychoses, marriages.

Bailing out means self-exploitation in ghettoes, pan-handling on filthy

street corners, crushing bugs between rocks out in the garden of the

commune. Cleverness has grown fatiguing. Stupidity is annoying.

It would be logical to ask ourselves some questions like these: “How

would I really like to live?” “In what kind of society (or non-society)

would I feel most comfortable?” “What do I really want to do with

myself?” “Regardless of their practicality, what are my true wishes and

desires?” And let’s try to picture all this not in a remote future

(reformists always like to talk about “the next generation”), but in our

own lifetimes, while we’re still in pretty good shape, let’s say within

the next five years….

Dreams, ideal visions, utopias, yearnings, alternatives: aren’t these

just new illusions to seduce us once again into participating in a

scheme for “progress”? Don’t we know them from the neolithic, from the

17^(th)-century, from the science-fiction and fantasy literature of

today? Do we succumb again to the charm of History? Isn’t The Future the

primary thought of the Machine? Is the only choice that between the

Machine’s own dream and the refusal of any activity?

There’s a kind of desire that, whenever it arises, is censored

scientifically, morally, politically. The ruling reality tries to stamp

it out. This desire is the dream of a second reality.

Reformists tell us that it’s short-sighted and egoistic to follow just

one’s own wishes. We must fight for the future of our children. We must

renounce pleasure (that car, vacation, a little more heat) and work

hard, so that the kids will have a better life. This is a very curious

logic. Isn’t it exactly the renunciation and sacrifice of our parents’

generation, their hard work in the ’50s and ’60s, that’s brought about

themess we’re in today? We are already those children, the ones for whom

so much work and suffering has gone on. For us, our parents bore (or

were lost to) two world wars, countless “lesser” ones, innumerable major

and minor crises and crashes. Our parents built, for us, nuclear bombs.

They were hardly egoistic; they did what they were told. They built on

sacrifice and self-renunciation, and all of this has just demanded more

sacrifice, more renunciation. Our parents, in their time, passed on

their own egoism, and they have trouble respecting ours. Other political

moralists could object that we’re hardly allowed to dream of utopias

while millions die of starvation, others are tortured in camps,

disappear, are deported or massacred. Minimal human rights alone are

hard to come by. While the spoiled children of consumer society compile

their lists of wishes, others don’t even know how to write, or have no

time to even think of wishes. Yet, look around a little: know anybody

dead of heroin, any brothers or sisters in asylums, a suicide or two in

the family? Whose misery is more serious? Can it be measured? Even if

there were no misery, would our desires be less real because others were

worse off, or because we could imagine ourselves worse off. Precisely

when we act only to prevent the worst, or because “others” are worse

off, we make this misery possible, allow it to happen. In just this way

we’re always forced to react on the initiatives of the Machine. There’s

always an outrageous scandal, an incredible impertinence, a provocation

that cannot be left unanswered. And so our 70 years go by — and the

years of the “others,” too. The Machine has no trouble keeping us busy

with that. It’s a good way to prevent us from becoming aware of these

immoral desires. If we started to act for ourselves, there would

definitely be trouble. As long as we only (re-)action the basis of

“moral differences”, we’ll be powerless as dented wheels, simply

exploding molecules in the engine of development. And as we’re already

weak, the Machine just gets more power to exploit the still weaker.

Moralism is one weapon of the Machine, realism another. The Machine has

formed our present reality, trained us to see in the Machine’s way.

Since Descartes and Newton, it has digitalized our thoughts, just like

reality. It’s laid its yes/no patterns over the world, over our spirits.

We believe in this reality, maybe because we’re so used to it. Yet as

long as we accept the Machine’s reality, we’re its victims. The Machine

uses its digital culture to pulverize our dreams, presentiments and

ideas. Dreams and utopias are sterilized in novels, films,

commercialized music. But this reality is in crisis; every day, there

are more cracks, and the yes/no alternative isn’t much less than an

apocalyptic threat. The Machine’s ultimate reality reads

self-destruction.

Our reality, the second reality of old and new dreams, cannot be caught

in the yes/no net. It refuses apocalypse and the status quo all at once.

Apocalypse or Evangel, armageddon or utopia, all or nothing: these are

the “realist” possibilities. In this reality, we choose one or the

other, lightheartedly. But medium attitudes like “hope”, “confidence”,

or “patience” are just ridiculous — pure self-deceit. There is no hope.

We have to choose now.

Nothingness has become a realistic possibility, more absolute than the

old nihilists dared dream of. In this respect, the Machine’s

accomplishments must certainly be acknowledged. Finally, we’ve gotten to

Nothingness! We do not have to survive! Nothingness has become a

realistic “alternative” with its own philosophy (Cioran, Schopenhauer,

Buddhism, Glücksmann), its fashion (black, uncomfortable), music,

housing style, painting, etc. Apocalyptics, nihilistics, pessimists, and

misanthropists have all got good arguments for their attitude. After

all, if you transform into values “life”, “nature”, or “mankind”, there

are only totalitarian risks, biocracy or ecofascism. You sacrifice

freedom to survival; new ideologies of renunciation arise and

contaminate all dreams and desires. The pessimists are the real free

ones, happy and generous. The world will never again be supportable

without the possibility of its self-destruction, just as the life of the

individual is a burden without the possibility of suicide. Nothingness

is here to stay.

On the other side, “all” is also quite appealing. It’s of course much

less probable than nothingness, badly defined, poorly thought out. It’s

ridiculous, megalomaniacal, self-conceited. Maybe it’s only around to

make Nothingness more attractive.

bolo’bolo

bolo’bolo is part of (my) second reality. It’s strictly subjective,

since the reality of dreams can never be objective. Is bolo’bolo all or

nothing? It’s both, and neither. It’s a trip into second reality, like

Yapfaz, Kwendolm, Takmas, and Ul-So. Down there there’s a lot of room

for many dreams. bolo’bolo is one of those unrealistic, amoral, egoistic

maneuvers of diversion from the struggle against the worst.

bolo’bolo is also a modest proposal for the new arrangements on the

spaceship after the Machine’s disappearance. Though it started as a mere

collection of wishes, a lot of considerations about their realization

have accumulated around it. bolo’bolo can be realized world-wide within

five years, if we start now. It guarantees a soft landing in the second

reality. Nobody will starve, freeze or die earlier than today in the

transition period. There’s very little risk.

Of course, general conceptions of a post-industrial civilization are not

lacking these days. Be it the eruption of the Age of Aquarius, the

change of paradigms, ecotopia, new networks, rhizomes, decentralized

structures, soft society, the new poverty, small circuitry, third waves,

or prosumer societies, the ecological or alternativist literature grows

rapidly. Allegedly soft conspiracies are going on, and the new society

is already being born in communes, sects, citizens’ initiatives,

alternative enterprises, block associations. In all these publications

and experiments there are a lot of good and useful ideas, ready to be

stolen and incorporated into bolo’bolo. But many of these futures (or

“futuribles”, as the French say) are not very appetizing: they stink of

renunciation, moralism, new labors, toilsome rethinking, modesty and

self-limitation. Of course there are limits, but why should they be

limits of pleasure and adventure? Why are most alternativists only

talking about new responsibilities and almost never about new

possibilities?

One of the slogans of the alternativists is: Think globally, act

locally. Why not think and act globally and locally? There are a lot of

new concepts and ideas, but what’s lacking is a practical global (and

local) proposal, a kind of common language. There has to be some

agreement on basic elements, so that we don’t stumble into the Machine’s

next trap. In this regard, modesty and (academic) prudence is a virtue

that risks disarming us. Why be modest in the face of impending

catastrophe?

bolo’bolo might not be the best and most detailed or certainly a

definitive proposal for a new arrangement of our spaceship. But it’s not

so bad, and acceptable to a lot of people. I’m for trying it as a first

attempt and seeing what happens later...

Substruction

In case we’d like to try bolo’bolo, the next question will be: How can

we make it happen? Isn’t it just another Realpolitical proposal? In

fact, bolo’bolo cannot be realized with politics; there’s another road,

a range of other roads, to be followed.

If we deal with the Machine, the first problem is obviously a negative

one: How can we paralyze and eliminate the Machine’s control (i.e., the

Machine itself) in such a way that bolo’bolo can unfold without being

destroyed at the start? We can call this aspect of our strategy

“deconstruction”, or subversion. The Planetary Work Machine has to be

dismantled — carefully, because we don’t want to perish together with

it. Let’s not forget that we’re parts of the Machine, that it is us. We

want to destroy the Machine, not ourselves. We only want to destroy our

function for the Machine. Subversion means to change the relationships

among us (the three types of workers) and towards the Machine (which

faces all workers as a total system). It is subversion, not attack,

since we’re still all inside the Machine and have to block it from

there. The Machine will never confront us as an external enemy. There

will never be a front line, no headquarters, no ranks, no uniforms.

Subversion alone, though, will always be a failure, though with its help

we might paralyze a certain sector of the Machine, destroy one of its

capabilities. Finally, the Machine is always able to reconquer and

occupy again. Every space initially obtained by subversion has instead

to be filled by us with something “new”, something “constructive”. We

cannot hope to eliminate first the Machine and then — in an “empty” zone

— establish bolo’bolo; we’d always arrive too late. Provisional elements

of bolo’bolo, seedlings of its structures, must occupy all free

interstices, abandoned areas, conquered bases, and prefigurate the new

relationships. Construction has to be combined with subversion into one

process: substruction (or “conversion”, if you prefer this one).

Construction should never be a pretext to renounce on subversion.

Subversion alone creates only straw fires, historical dates and

“heroes”, but it doesn’t leave concrete results. Construction and

subversion are both forms of tacit or open collaboration with the

Machine.

Dysco

Dealing first with subversion, it’s clear that every type of work, any

one who functions for the Machine in any part of the world, has his or

her own specific potential for subversion. There are different ways of

damaging the Machine, and not every one has the same possibilities. A

planetary menu for subversion could be described a little like this:

Dysinformation: sabotage (of hardware or programs), theft of

machine-time (for games or any private purposes), defective design or

planning, indiscretions (e.g., Ellsberg and the Watergate scandal),

desertions (scientists, officials), refusal of selection (by teachers),

mismanagement, treason, ideological deviation, false information to

superiors, etc. And effects can be immediate or quite long-term —

seconds or years.

Dysproduction: opting out, low quality, manufacturing, sabotage,

strikes, sick leaves, shop-floor assemblies, demonstrations in the

factories, use of mobility, occupations (e.g., the recent struggles of

Polish workers). These effects are usually medium-term — weeks or

months.

Dysruption: riots, street blockades, violent acts, flight, divorce,

domestic rows, looting, guerrilla warfare, squatting, arson (e.g., Sao

Paulo, Miami, Soweto, El Salvador). Effects here are short-term — hours

or days.

Of course, all these acts also have long-term effects; we’re here only

talking about their direct impact as forms of activity. Any of these

types of subversion can damage the Machine, can even paralyze it

temporarily. But each of them can be neutralized by the two other forms

— their impact is different according to time and space. Dysinformation

remains inefficient if it’s not used in the production or physical

circulation of goods or services. Otherwise, it becomes a purely

intellectual game and destroys only itself. Strikes can always be

crushed if nobody, by dysruptive actions, prevents the police from

intervening. Dysruption ends swiftly so long as the Machine gets its

supply from the production-sector. The Machine knows that there will

always be subversion against it, and that the deal between it and the

different types of workers will always have to be bargained for and

fought out again. It only tries to stagger the attacks of the three

sectors so that they can’t support and multiply each other, becoming a

kind of counter-machine. Workers who have just won a strike

(dysproduction) are angry about unemployed demonstrators who prevent

them, via a street blockade, from getting back to the factory on time. A

firm goes bankrupt, and the workers complain about poor managers and

engineers. But what if it was a substructive engineer who willfully

produced a bad design, or a manager who wanted to sabotage the firm? The

workers still lose their jobs, take part in unemployment demonstrations,

finally engage in riots... until the police-workers come and do their

jobs. The Machine transforms the single attacks of different sectors

into idle motion, for nothing is more instructive than defeats, nothing

more dangerous than long periods of calm (in this latter case, the

Machine loses the ability to tell what’s going on inside the organisms

of its body). The Machine can’t exist without a certain level of

sickness and dysfunction. Partial struggles become the best means of

control — a kind of fever thermometer — providing it with imagination

and dynamism. If necessary, the Machine can even provoke its own

struggles, just to test its instruments of control.

Dysinformation, dysproduction, and dysruption would have to be joined on

a mass level in order to produce a critical situation for the Machine.

Such a deadly conjuncture could only come into being by the overcoming

of the separation of the three functions and worker types. There must

emerge a kind of communication that’s not adequate to the design of the

Machine: dyscommunication. The name of the final game against the

Machine is thus ABC-dysco.

Where can such ABC-dysco knots develop? Hardly where workers meet in

their Machine functions — that is, at the work place, in the

supermarket, in the household. A factory is precisely organized

division, and things like unions only mirror this division, not overcome

it. On the job, different interests are particularly accentuated; wages,

positions, hierarchies, privileges, titles, all of these build up walls.

In the factories and offices, workers are isolated from each other, the

noise (physical, semantic, cultural) levels are high, tasks are too

absorbing. ABC-dysco is not likely to happen best in the economic core

of the Machine.

But there are domains of life — for the Machine, mostly marginalized

domains — that are, more propitious for dysco. The Machine hasn’t

digitalized and rationalized everything: often, in fact, not religion,

mystic experiences, language, native place, nature, sexuality, desire,

all kinds of spleens, crazy fixations, just plain fancy. Life as a whole

still manages to slip away from the Machine’s basic pattern. Of course,

the Machine has long been aware of its insufficiency in these fields,

and has tried to functionalize them economically. Religion can become

sect-business, nature can be exploited by tourism and sport, the love of

one’s home can degenerate into an ideological pretext for the weapons

industries, sexuality can be commodified, etc. Bascially, there’s no

need or desire that can’t be merchandised, but as merchandise it of

course gets reduced and mutilated, and the true needs and desires move

on to something else. Certain needs are particularly inappropriate for

mass production: above all, authentic, personal experience.

Commodification succeeds only partially, and more and more people become

aware of “the rest”. The success of the environmental movements, of the

peace movement, of ethnic or regionalist movements, of certain forms of

new “religiousness” (progressive or pacifist churches), of the

homosexual subcultures, is probably due to this insufficiency. Wherever

identities that lie beyond the logic of the economy have been newly

discovered or created, there can be found ABC knots. As “war objectors”,

intellectuals, shopkeepers, women and men have met. Homosexuals gather

without primary regard for job identity. Navajos, Basques, or Armenians

struggle together; a kind of “new nationalism” or regionalism ovecomes

job and education barriers. The Black Madonna of Czestochowa contributed

in uniting Polish farmers, intellectuals and workers alike. It’s no

accident that inrecent times it’s almost exclusively these types of

alliances that have given movements certain strengths. Their

substructive power is based on the multiplication of ABC encounters that

have been possible in their frameworks. One of the first reactions of

the Machine has always been to play off against each other the elements

of these encounters, reestablishing the old mechanism of mutual

repulsion.

The above-mentioned movements have only produced superficial and

shortlived ABC-dysco. In most cases, the different types just touched

each other on a few occasions and then slipped back into their everyday

division, as before. They created more mythologies than realities. In

order to exist longer and to exert substantial influence, they should

also be able to fulfill everyday tasks outside of the Machine, should

also comprise the constructive side of substruction. They should attempt

the organization of mutual help, of moneyless exchange, of services, of

concrete cultural functions in neighborhoods. In this context, they

should become anticipations of bolos, of barter-agreements, of

independent food supply, etc. Ideologies (or religions) are not strong

enough to overcome barriers like income; education, position. The

ABC-types have to compromise themselves in everyday life. Certain levels

of self—sufficiency, of independence from state and economy, must be

reached to stabilize such dysco-knots. You can’t work 40 hours per week

and still have the time and energy for neighborhood initiatives.

ABC-knots can’t just be cultural decorations, they must be able to

replace at least a small fraction of money income, in order to get some

free time. How these ABC-dysco knots will look, practically, can only be

discovered on the practical level. Maybe they will be neighborhood

centers, food conspiracies, farmer/crafts-men exchanges, street

communities, commune bases, clubs, service exchanges, energy co-ops,

communal baths, car pools, etc. All kinds of meeting points — bringing

together all three types of workers on the basis of common interests —

are possible ABC-dyscos.

The totality of such ABC knots disintegrates the Machine, producing new

subversive conjunctures, keeping in motion all kinds of invisible

movements. Diversity, invisibility, flexibility, the absence of names,

flags or labels, the refusal of pride or honor, the avoidance of

political behavior and the temptations of “representation” can protect

such knots from the eyes and hands of the Machine. Information,

experiences, and practical instruments can be shared in this way.

ABC-dysco knots can be laboratories for new, puzzling, and surprising

forms of action, can use all three functions and the respective

dysfunctions of the Machine. Even the brain of the Machine has no access

to this wealth of information, since it must keep divided the very

thinking about itself (the principle of divided responsibility and

competence). ABC-dysco knots are not a party, not even a kind of

movement, coalition or umbrella organization. They’re just themselves,

the cumulation of their single effects. They might meet in punctual mass

movement, testing their strength and the reaction of the Machine, and

then disappear again into everyday life. They combine their forces where

they meet each other in practical tasks. They’re not an anti-Machine

movement, but they are the content and material basis for the

destruction of the Machine.

Due to their conscious non-organizedness, ABC knots are always able to

create surprises. Surprise is vital, as we’re at a fundamental

disadvantage when faced with the Machine, one that cannot be easily

ovecome: we can always be blackmailed by the constant threats of death

or suicide pronounced by the Planetary Machine. It can’t be denied that

geurrilla warfare as a means of subversion can be necessary in certain

circumstances (where the Machine is already engaged in killing). The

more ABC knots, networks and tissues there are, the more the Machine’s

death instinct is awakened. But it’s already part of our defeat if we

have to face the Machine with heroism and readiness for sacrifice.

Somehow, we have to accept the Machine’s blackmailing. Whenever the

Machine starts killing, we have to retreat. We shouldn’t frighten it; it

has to die in a moment when it least suspects. This sounds defeatist,

but it’s one of the lessons we have to learn from Chile, from Poland,

from Grenada. When the struggle can be put on the level involving the

police or the military, we’re about to lose. Or, if we do win, it’s

exactly our own police or military that will have won, not us at all;

we’ll end up with one of those well-known “revolutionary” military

dictatorships. When the Machine takes to raw killing, we have obviously

made a mistake. We must never forget that we are also those who shoot.

We’re never facing the enemy, we are the enemy. This fact has nothing to

do with the ideologies of non-violence; the most violent ideologies

often refrain from killing. Damage to the Machine and violence are not

necessarily linked. Nor, however, does it serve us to put flowers into

the buttonholes of uniforms, or go out of our way to be nice to the

police. They can’t be swindled by phony symbolism, arguments or

ideologies — they are like us. Still, maybe the cop has some good

neighbors, maybe the general’s gay, maybe the guy on the front lines has

heard from his sister about some ABC-dysco knot. When there get to be

enough dyscos, there are also enough security leaks and risks for the

Machine. We will of course have to be careful, practical, discrete.

When the Machine kills, there aren’t yet enough ABC-dyscos. Too many

parts of its organism are still in good health, and it’s trying to save

itself with preventive surgery. The Machine won’t die of frontal attack,

but it can very well die of ABC-cancer, learning about it only too late

for an operation. These are just the rules of the game; those who don’t

respect them better get right out (let them be the heroes).

Substruction as a (general) strategy is a form of practical meditation.

It can be represented by the following yantra, combining substruction

(the movement aspect) with bolo (the future basic community):

[]

Trico

The Work Machine has a planetary character, so a successful bolo’bolo

strategy must also be planetary from the outset. Purely local, regional

or even national dysco knots will never be sufficient to paralyze the

Work Machine as a whole. West, East and South must start simultaneously

to subvert their respective functions inside the Machine and create new,

constructive anticipations. What’s true for the three types of Workers

on a micro-level is also true for the three parts of the world on a

macro-level. There must be planetary dysco knots. There must be

tricommunication between dysco knots: trico, the planetary trico trick.

Trico is dysco between ABC knots in each of the three major parts of the

world: Western industrial countries, socialist countries, underdeveloped

countries. A trico knot is the encounter of three local ABC knots on an

international level.

Anticipations of bolos must be established outside of governments, away

from existing international organizations or development-aid groups. The

contacts must function directly between neighborhoods, between everyday

initiatives of all kinds. There might be a trico between St. Mark’s

Place in New York’s East Village, North-East 7 in Gdansk, Poland, and

Mutum Biyu in Nigeria; or perhaps Zurich Stauffacher, Novosibirsk Block

A-23, and Fuma, fiji Islands. Such trico knots could first originate on

the basis of accidental personal acquaintances (tourist trips, etc.).

Then they could be multiplied by the activity of already existing

tricos. The practical use of the trico knot (and there must be one) can

be very trivial in the beginning: the exchange of necessary goods

(medicine, records, spices, clothes, equipment), done moneylessly, or at

least as cheaply as possible. It’s obvious that the conditions of

exchange of goods are far from equal among the three parts of the world:

the Third World partner in a trico will need a lot of basic products to

make up for the exploitation by the world market. Third World

communities will also need a lot of material for the construction of a

basic infrastructure (fountains, telephones, generators). Nevertheless,

this doesn’t mean that the trico is just a type of development aid. The

partners will be creating a common project, the contact will be

person-to-person, the aid will be adapted to real needs and based on

personal relationships. Even under these conditions, exchange won’t

necessarily be onesided. A workers in a dysco knot will give a lot of

material goods (as they have plenty), but they’ll get much more in

cultural and spiritual “goods” in return; they’ll learn a lot about

life-styles in traditional settings, about the natural environment,

about mythologies, other forms of human relations. As we’ve said before,

even the most miserable C Deals offer some advantages; instead of

frightening our A-selves with the disadvantages of other deals, we’ll

exchange those elements that are still valuable and strong.

The trico knots permit the participating ABC dysco knots to unmask the

mutual illusions of their deals, and assist in stopping the

division-game of the Work Machine. Western dyscos will learn about

socialist everyday life, ridding themselves of both red-baiting

anti-communism and ridiculous socialist propaganda. The Eastern partners

will find themselves giving up their impossible fantasies about the

Golden West, and at the same time will be better able to immunize

themselves against the official indoctrination in their own countries.

Third World dyscos will protect themselves from “development”

ideologies, socialist demogagy and blackmail-by-misery. All this won’t

be foisted off as an “educational” process, but will be a natural

consequence of tricommunication. A Western dysco knot might help the

Eastern partner get a Japanese stereo (needs are needs, even those

created by the Machine’s advertizing strategies). In the process of

trico-expansion, of closer exchange and of growing bolo’bolo structures,

authentic wishes will become predominate. Dances and fairy tales from

Dahomey will be more interesting than TV game shows, gritty Russian folk

songs will sound more attractive than Pepsi jingles, etc.

Planetary substruction from the beginning is a precondition for the

success of the strategy that leads to bolo’bolo. If bolo’bolo remains

just the spleen of a single country or region, it’s lost; it will become

just another impulse for “development.” On the basis of

tricommunication, those planetary relationships come into being that

will disintegrate nation-states and the political blocs. Like the

dysco-knots, the trico-knots will form a substructive network that’ll

paralyze the Work Machine. Out of tricos will come barter agreements

(fenos), general hospitality (sila), new culturally defined regions

(sumi), and a planetary meeting point (asa’dala). The trico network will

also have to block the war machines of single countries from the inside,

thus proving to be the real peace movement — simply because they’re not

primarily interested in “peace”, but because they’ve got a common,

positive project.

Provisional Schedule

If everything works out well, bolo’bolo can be realized by the end of

1987. We’re responsible ourselves for delays. The following schedule may

be useful to judge our progress:

asa’pili

ibu

[]

In fact, there’s really only the ibu, and nothing else. But the ibu is

unreliable, paradoxical, perverse. There’s only one single ibu, but

nevertheless it behaves as if there were four billion or so. The ibu

also knows that it invented the world and reality by itself, yet it

still firmly believes that these hallucinations are real. The ibu could

have dreamed an agreeable, unproblematic reality, but it insisted on

imagining a miserable, brutish and contradictory world[5].

It has dreamed a reality in which it is constantly tormented by

conflict, catastrophe, crisis. It’s torn between ecstasy and boredom,

between enthusiasm and deception, between tranquility and agitation. It

has a body that needs 2000 calories a day, that gets tired, cold, gets

ill; it expels this body every 70 years or so — a lot of unnecessary

complication.

The ibus external world is a continuing nightmare, too. Enervating

dangers keep it caught between fear and heroism. All the while, it could

end this ghastly theatre by killing itself and disappearing forever.

Since there’s only one single ibu and the universe that it has dreamed

up for itself, it has no care about surviving dependents, mourning

friends, unpaid bills, etc. Its death would be absolutely without

consequences. Nature, humanity, history, space, logic, everything

disappears together with it. The ibus toils are completely voluntary,

and yet it affirms that it s only a powerless element of a greater

reality. Why all of this self-deceit?

Apparently, the ibu is in love with its own masochistic nightmare of

torture. It has even protected this nightmare scientifically against

nothingness. It defines dreams as unreal, so its nightmare becomes the

dream of the unreality of dreaming. The ibu has locked itself into the

reality trap.

Natural laws, logic, mathematics, scientific facts and social

responsibilities form the walls of this reality trap. As the ibu insists

upon dreaming its own powerlessness, power comes from exterior instances

to whom the ibu owes its obedience: God, Life, the State, Morality,

Progress, Welfare, the Future, Productivity. On the basis of these

pretensions, it invents the “sense of life”, which it can never reach,

of course. It feels constantly guilty, and is kept in an unhappy tension

in which it forgets itself and its power over the world.

In order to prevent itself from recognizing itself and finding out the

dream-character of its reality, the ibu has invented “others”. It

imagines that these artificial beings are like itself. As in an

absurdist drama, it entertains “relations” with them, loving or hating

them, even asking them for advice or philosophical explanations. So it

flees from its own consciousness, delegating to others in order to be

rid of it. It concretizes the “other” ibus by organizing them into

institutions: couples, families, clubs, tribes, nations, mankind. It

invents “society” fot itself, and subjects to its rules. The nightmare

is perfect.

Only if there are accidental cracks in its dream world does the ibu deal

with itself. But, instead of terminating this perverse existence, the

ibu pities itself, stays dead by remaining alive. This repressed suicide

is displaced outwards, to “reality”, and returns from there back to the

ibu in the form of collective apocalypse (nuclear holocaust, ecological

castastrophe). Too weak to kill itself, the ibu looks to reality to do

it for it.

The ibu likes to be tortured, so it imagines wonderful utopias,

paradises, har-monical worlds that of course can never be realized.

These only serve to fix up the nightmare, giving the ibu still-born

hopes and instigating it to all kinds of political and economic

enterprises, activities, revolutions, and sacrifices. The ibu always

takes the bait of illusions or desires. It doesn’t understand reason. It

forgets that all worlds, all realities, all dreams and its own existence

are infinitely boring and tiresome, and that the only solution consists

in retiring immediately into comfortable nothingness.

bolo

[]

The ibu is still around, refusing nothingness, hoping for a new, better

nightmare. It’s still lonely, but it believes that it can overcome its

loneliness by some agreements with the “other” four billion ibus. Are

they out there? You can never be sure...

So, together with 300 to 500 ibus, the ibu joins a bolo. The bolo is its

basic agreement with other ibus, a direct, personal context for living,

producing, dying.[6] The bolo replaces the old “agreement” called money.

In and around the bolo the ibus can get their daily 2000 calories, a

living space, medical care, the basics of survival, and indeed much

more.

The ibu is born in a bolo, it passes its childhood there, is taken care

of when it’s ill, learns certain things, tinkers around, is hugged and

stroked when sad, takes care of other ibus, hangs out, disappears. No

ibu can be expelled from a bolo. But it’s always free to leave it and

return. The bolo is the ibu’s home on our spaceship.

The ibu isn’t obliged to join a bolo. It can stay truly alone, form

smaller groups, conclude special agreements with bolos. If a substantial

part of all ibus unite in bolos, money economies die and can never

return. The near-complete selfsufficiency of the bolo guarantees its

independence. The bolos are the core of a new, personal, direct way of

social exchange. Without bolos, the money economy must return, and the

ibu will be alone again with its job, with its money, dependent on

pensions, the State, the police.

The self-sufficiency of the bolo is based on two elements: on the

buildings and equipment for housing and crafts (sibi), and on a piece of

land for the production of most of its food (kodu). The agricultural

basis can also consist of pastures, mountains, fishing and hunting

grounds, palm tree groves, algae cultures, gathering areas, etc.,

according to geographical conditions. The bolo is largely

self-sufficient so far as the daily supply of basic food is concerned.

It can repair and maintain its buildings and tools by itself. In order

to guarantee hospitality (sila), it must be able to feed an additional

30–50 guests or travelers out of its own resources.[7]

Self-sufficiency isn’t necessarily isolation or self-restraint. The

bolos can conclude agreements of exchange with other bolos and get a

larger variety of foods or services (see feno). This cooperation is bi-

or multi-lateral, not planned by a centralized organization; it’s

entirely voluntary. The bolo itself can choose its degree of autarky or

interdependence, according to its cultural identity (nima).

Size and number of inhabitants of bolos can be roughly identical in all

parts of the world. Its basic functions and obligations (sila) are the

same everywhere. But its territorial, architectural, organizational,

cultural and other forms or values (if there are any) can be manifold.

No bolo looks like any other, just as no ibu is identical with any

other. Every ibu and bolo has its own identity. And bolo’bolo is not a

system, but a patchwork of micro-systems.

bolos don’t have to be built in empty spaces. They’re much more a

utilization of existing structures. In larger cities, a bolo can consist

of one or two blocks, of a smaller neighborhood, of a complex of

adjacent buildings. You just have to build connecting arcades,

overpasses, using first floors as communal spaces, making openings in

certain walls, etc. So, a typical older neighborhood could be

transformed into a bolo like this:

[]

Larger and higher housing projects can be used as vertical bolos. In the

countryside, a bolo corresponds to a small town, to a group of

farmhouses, to a valley. A bolo needn’t be architecturally unified. In

the South Pacific, a bolo is a coral island, or even a group of smaller

atolls. In the desert, the bolo might not even have a precise location;

rather, it’s the route of the nomads who belong to it (maybe all members

of the bolo meet only once or twice a year). On rivers or lakes, bolos

can be formed with boats. There can be bolos in former factory

buildings, palaces, caves, battleships, monasteries, under the ends of

the Brooklyn Bridge, in museums, zoos, at Knotts Berry Farm or Fort

Benning, in the Iowa Statehouse, shopping malls, the University of

Michigan football stadium, Folsom Prison. The bolos will build their

nests everywhere, the only general features are their size and

functions. Some possible shapes of bolos:

[]

sila

[]

From the point of view of the ibu, the bolo’s function is to guarantee

its survival, to make its life enjoyable, to give it a home or

hospitality when it s traveling. The agreement between the whole of the

bolos (bolo’bolo) and a single ibu is called sila. As the ibu hasn’t any

money (nor a job!), nor any obligation to live in a bolo, all bolos have

to guarantee hospitality to arriving single ibus. Evey bolo is a virtual

hotel, any ibu a virtual non-paying guest. (We’re only guests on this

planet, anyway.)

Money is a social agreement whose observance is enforced by the police,

justice, prisons, psychiatric hospitals. It is not natural. As soon as

these institutions collapse or malfunction, money loses its

“value”-nobody can catch the “thief,” and everybody who doesn’t steal is

a fool.[8]

As the money agreement functions badly, is in fact about to ruin the

planet and its inhabitants, there is some interest in replacing it with

a new arrangement, sila, the rules of hospitality.[9]

sila contains the following agreements:

The real basis of the sila are the bolos, because single ibus wouldn’t

be able to guarantee these agreements on a permament basis. sila is a

minimal guarantee of survival offered by the bolos to their members and

to a certain proportion of guests. A bolo can refuse sila if there are

more than 10% guests. A bolo has to produce 10% more food, housing,

medicine, etc., than it needs for its stable members. Larger communities

(like the tega or vudo) handle more resources, should certain bolos have

surpluses, or if more than 10% guests show up.

Why should the bolos respect hospitality rules? Why should they work for

others, for strangers? bolos consist of ibus and these ibus are

potential guests or travelers, too; everybody can take advantage of

hospitality. The risk of abuse or exploitation of the resident ibus by

the traveling ibus is very low. First, a nomadic life-style has its own

disadvantages, since you can then never participate in the richer inner

life of a bolo. A traveling ibu has to adapt to a new cuisine and

culture, cannot take part in long-term enterprises, and can always be

put on a minimum ration. On the other side, travelers can also benefit

the visited community; traveling can even be considered a form of

“work”. Travelers are necessary for the circulation of news, fashions,

ideas, know-how, stories, products, etc. Guests are interested in

fulfilling these “functions” because they can expect better-than-minimal

hospitality. Hospitality and travelling are a level of social exchange.

A certain pressure to respect hospitality is exerted on the bolos by

munu, honor or reputation. The experiences had by travellers to a bolo

are very important, since ibus can travel very far and talk about them

anywhere. Reputation is crucial, because possible mutual agreements

between bolos are influenced by it. Nobody would like to deal with

unreliable, unfriendly bolos. As there is no more anonymous mediation by

the circulation of money, personal impressions and reputation are

essential again. In this regard, bolos are like aristocratic lineages,

and their image is formed by honor.

taku

[]

The first and most remarkable component of sila is the taku, a container

made of solid sheet metal or wood, that looks like this:

[]

According to the customs of its bolo, every ibu gets a taku. Whatever

fits into the taku is the ibu’s exclusive property — the rest of the

planet is used and held together. Only the ibu has access to the things

contained in its taku — nobody else. It can put in it what it wants. It

can carry the taku with itself, and no ibu has any right under any

circumstances whatsoever to inspect its contents or to ask for

information about it (not even in cases of murder or theft). The taku is

absolutely unimpeachable, holy, taboo, sacrosanct, private, exclusive,

personal. But only the taku. The ibu can store in it dirty clothes or

machine guns, drugs or old love letters, sankes or stuffed mice,

diamonds or peanuts, stereo tapes or stamp collections. We can only

guess. As long as it doesn’t stink or make noise (i.e., exert influences

beyond itself) anything can be in it.

As the ibu might be very obstinate (ibus being notoriously peculiar and

perverse), it needs some property. Maybe the idea of property is just a

temporary degeneration caused by civilization, but who knows? The taku

is the pure, absolute and refined form of property, but also its

limitation. (All the ibus together could still imagine to “own” the

whole planet, if that helps make them happy.) The taku could be

important for the ibu, helping it remember, for example, that it isn’t

an abu, ubu, gagu or something else equally unclear, unstable, or

indefinable. In fact, the single ibu has many other opportunities for

minimal security about its identity: mirrors, friends, psychiatrists,

clothes, tapes, diaries, scars, birthmarks, photos, souvenirs, letters,

prayers, dogs, computers, “wanted” circulars, etc. The ibu doesn’t need

objects in order not to lose its identity in a general ecstasy. Yet the

loss of intimate things could be very disagreeable, and therefore should

be protected against. Maybe the ibu needs secret intercourse with

obscure caskets, collections, fetishes, books, amulets, jewels, trophies

and relics so it can believe itself something special. It needs

something to show to other ibus when it wants to prove its trust. Only

what is secret and taboo can really be shown. Everything else is

evident, dull, without charm or glamour.

Like unlimited property, the taku brings some risks, too, though these

are now more concrete and direct. The taku can contain weapons, poisons,

magical objects, dynamite, maybe unknown drugs. But the taku can never

exert the unconscious, uncontrolled social domination that money and

capital do today. There is a (limited) danger; so, trust, reputation,

and personal relationships will still prove their strength.

kana

[]

The kana might be the most frequent and practical subdivision of a

bolo, *since the bolo is probably too large for immediate living

together.[10] A kana consists of 15–30 ibus, and a bolo contains about

20 kanas. A kanas occupies a larger house in a city, or a couple of

houses combined to a single household. It corresponds to a hamlet, a

hunting group, a kinship group, a community. The kana is organized

around the inner domestic (or hut-, tent-, boat-) life, yet it is

completely defined by the lifestyle and cultural identity of its bolo.

It cannot be independent in its supply of food or goods, for it’s too

small and therefore too unstable (as the experiences of the 1960’s

alternative communities shows). According to the bolo-lifestyle, there

can be more arrangements besides the kana: couples, triangles, nuclear

families, parenthoods, households, teams, etc. A bolo can also consist

of 500 single ibus who live together, as in a hotel or a monastery, each

on its own, cooperating only on a minimal level to guarantee survival

and hospitality. The degree of collectivity or individualism is only

limited by these basic necessities. Any ibu can find the bola or kana it

likes, or found new ones.

nima

[]

bolos can’t just be neighborhoods or practical arrangements. That is

only their technical, external aspect. The real motivation for ibus to

live together is a common cultural background, the nima. Every ibu has

its own conviction and vision of life as it should be, but certain nimas

can only be realized if like-minded ibus can be found. In a bolo, they

can live, transform and complete their common nima. On the other side,

those ibus whose nimas exclude social forms (hermits, bums,

misanthropists, yogis, fools, individual anarchists, magicians, martyrs,

sages or witches) can stay alone and live in the interstices of the

ubiquitious, but far from compulsory, bolos.

The nima contains habits, lifestyle, philosophy, values, interests,

clothing styles, cuisine, manners, sexual behavior, education, religion,

architecture, crafts, arts, colors, rituals, music, dance, mythology,

body-painting: everything that belongs to a cultural identity or

tradition. The nima defines life, as the ibu imagines it, in its

practical everyday form.

The sources of nimas are as manifold as they are. They can be ethnic

traditions (living or re-discovered ones), philosophical currents,

sects, historical experiences, common struggles or catastrophes, mixed

forms or newly invented ones. A nima can be general or quite specific

(as in the case of sects or ethnic traditions). It can be extremely

original or only a variant of another nima. It can be very open to

innovation or closed and conservative. nimas can appear like fashions,

or spread like epidemics, and die out. They can be gentle or brutal,

passive-contemplative or active-extraverted.[11] The nimas are the real

wealth of the bolos (“wealth” = manifold spiritual and material

possibilities).

As any type of nima can appear, it is also possible that brutal,

patriarchal, repressive, dull, fanatical terror cliques could establish

themselves in certain bolos. There are no humanist, liberal or

democratic laws or rules about the content of nimas and there is no

State to enforce them. Nobody can prevent a bolo from committing mass

suicide, dying of drug experiments, driving itself into madness or being

unhappy under a violent regime. bolos with a bandit-nima could terrorize

whole regions or continents, as the Huns or Vikings did. Freedom and

adventure, generalized terrorism, the law of the club, raids, tribal

wars, vendettas, plundering — everything goes.

On the other side, the logic of bolo’bolo puts a limit on the

practicability and the expansion of this kind of behavior and these

traditions. Looting and banditry has its own economics. Furthermore,

it’s absurd to transpose motivations of the present system of money and

property into bolo’bolo. A bandit-bolo must be relatively strong and

well-organized, and it needs a structure of internal discipline and

repression. For the ruling clique inside such a bolo, this would have to

mean permament vigilance and a high amount of repression-work. Their

ibus could leave the bolo at any moment, other ibus could show up and

the surrounding bolos would be able to observe the strange evolutions in

such a bolo from the beginning. They could send guests, restrict their

exchange, ruin the munu of the bandit-bolo, help the oppressed of the

bolo against the ruling clique. Supplying food and other goods, getting

weapons and equipment would pose severe problems. The ibus of the

bandit-bolo would have to work in the first place to get a basis for

their raids: hence the possibility of rebellion against the chiefs.

Without a State apparatus on a relatively large scale, repression would

require a lot of work and would not be easily profitable for the

oppressors. Raids and exploitation would not be very profitable, either,

because there is no means to preserve the stolen goods in an easily

transportable form (no money). Nobody would enter into an exchange with

such a bolo. So it would have to steal goods in their natural form,

which means a lot of transportation work and the necessity of

repetitious raids. As there are few streets, few cars, scarce means of

individual transportation, a bandit-bolo could only raid its neighbors,

and would quickly exhaust their resources. Add the resistance of other

bolos, the possible intervention of militias of larger communities

(tega, vudo, sumi: see yaka) and banditry becomes a very unprofitable,

marginal behavior.

Historically, conquest, plundering and oppression between nations have

always been effects of internal repression and of lack or impossibility

of communication. Both causes cannot exist in bolo’bolo: bolos are too

small for effective repression, and at the same time the means of

communication are well-developed (telephone networks, computer networks,

ease of travel, etc). In single bolos domination doesn’t payoff, and

independence is only possible with an agricultural base. Predator bolos

are still possible, but only as a kind of l’art pour l’art, and for

short periods of time. Anyway, why should we start all that again, as we

have now at our disposal the experiences of history? And who should be

the world-controllers if we’re not able to understand these lessons?

In a larger city, we could find the following bolos: Alco-bolo,

Sym-bolo, Sado-bolo, Maso-bolo, Vegi-bolo, Les-bolo, Franko-bolo,

Italo-bolo, Play-bolo, No-bolo, Retro-bolo, Thai-bolo, Sun-bolo,

Blue-bolo, Paleo-bolo, Dia-bolo, Punk-bolo, Proto-bolo, Krishna-bolo,

Taro-bolo, Jesu-bolo, Tao-bolo, Para-bolo, Pussy-bolo, Marl-bolo,

Necro-bolo, Basket-bolo, Coca-bolo, Incapa-bolo, HighTech-bolo,

Indio-bolo, Alp-bolo, Mono-bolo, Metro-bolo, Acro-bolo, Soho-bolo,

Herb-bolo, Macho-bolo, Hebro-bolo, Ara-bolo, Freak-bolo, Straight-bolo,

Pyramido-bolo, Marx-bolo, Sol-bolo, Tara-bolo, Uto-bolo, Sparta-bolo,

Bala-bolo, Gam-bolo, Tri-bolo, Logo-bolo, Mago-bolo, Anarcho-bolo,

Eco-bolo, Dada-bolo, Digito-bolo, Subur-bolo, Bom-bolo, Hyper-bolo,

Rasle-bolo, etc. Moreover, there are also just good old regular bolos,

where people live normal, reasonable and healthy lives (whatever those

are).

The diversity of cultural identities destroys modern mass culture and

commercialized fashions, but also the standardized national languages.

As there is no centralized school system, every bolo can speak its own

language or dialect. These can be existing languages, slangs, or

artificial languages. Thus the official languages, with their function

as a means of control and domination, decay, and there results a kind of

Babylonian chaos, i.e., an ungovernability through dysinformation. As

this linguistic disorder could cause some problems for travellers, or in

emergencies, there is asa’pili — an artificial vocabulary of some basic

terms that can be easily learned by everybody. asa’pili is not a real

language, for it consists only of a few words (like: ibu, bolo, sila,

nima, etc.), and their corresponding signs (for those incapable of or

refusing verbal speech). With the help of asa’pili, every ibu can get

anywhere the basic necessities like food, shelter, medical care, etc. If

it wants to understand better a bolo speaking a foreign language, the

ibu will have to study it. As the ibu now has a lot of time, this should

not prove such a problem. The natural language barrier is also a

protection against cultural colonization. Cultural identities cannot be

consumed in a superficial way — you really do have to get acquainted

with all the elements, spend some time with the people.[12]

kodu

[]

The kodu is the agricultural basis of the bolo’s self-sufficiency and

independence. The type of agriculture, the choice of crops and methods

is influenced by the cultural background of each bolo. A Vege-bolo would

specialize in vegetables, fruits, etc., instead of cattle-raising. An

Islam-bolo would never deal with pigs. A Franko-bolo would need a large

chicken yard, fresh herbs and lots of cheese. A Hash-bolo would plant

cannabis, a Booze-bolo malt and hops (with a distillery in the barn), an

Italo-bolo needs tomatoes, garlic and oregano. Certain bolos would be

more dependent upon exchange, as their diet is very diversified. Others,

with a more monotonous cuisine, could almost entirely rely on

themselves.

Agriculture is part of a bolo’s general culture. It defines its way of

dealing with nature and food. Its organization cannot then be described

on a general level. There might be bolos where agriculture appears as a

kind of “work”, because other occupations there would be considered more

important. Even in this case, agricultural work wouldn’t put grave

limits on every single ibu’s freedom: the work would be divided among

all the members of the bolo. This would perhaps mean a month of

agricultural work per year, or 10% of the available “active” time. If

agriculture is a central element of a bolo’s cultural identity, there’s

no problem at all: it would be a pleasure. In any case, everybody would

have to acquire some agricultural know-how, even those who do not

consider it crucial for their cultural identity, because it is a

condition for any bolo’s independence. There won’t be food stores, nor

supermarkets, nor (unfairly) cheap imports from economically blackmailed

countries. There won’t be any centralized distribution by a state

apparatus either (e.g., in the form of rationing). The bolos really have

to rely upon themselves.[13]

The kodu abolishes the separation of producers and consumers in the most

important domain of life: the production of food. But kodu isn’t just

this, it’s the whole of the ibu’s intercourse with “nature” — i.e.,

agriculture and “nature” cannot be understood as two separate notions.

The notion of“nature” appeared at the same moment we lost our direct

contact with it, as we became dependent upon agriculture, economy and

the State. Without an agricultural basis for self-sufficiency, the ibus

or bolos are basically exposed to blackmailing — they might have as many

“guarantees”, “rights”, or “agreements” as they like, it’s all just

written on the wind. The power of the State is ultimately based upon its

control over food supply. Only on the basis of a certain degree of

autarky can the bolos enter into a network of exchange without being

exploited.

As every bolo has its own land, the division between rural and urban is

no longer so pronounced. The conflict of interest between farmers

struggling for high prices and consumers demanding cheap food no longer

exists. Moreover, nobody can be interested in waste, artificial

shortages, deterioration, maldistribution, or planned obsolesence of

agricultural products. Everybody is directly interested in the

production of qualitatively good and healthy food, because they produce

and eat it themselves and they’re also responsible for their own medical

care (see bete). Careful treatment of the soil, the animals and

themselves becomes self evident, for every bolo is interested in

long-term fertility and the preservation of resources.

The use of land or other resources and their distribution among bolos

must be discussed and adapted carefully. There are a lot of possible

solutions, according to the situation. For pure country-side bolos

(Agro-bolos) there are few problems, since they can use the surrounding

land. For bolos in larger cities, it can be useful to have small gardens

around the houses, on roofs, in courtyards, etc. Around the city there

would be a garden zone, where every bolo would have a larger plot for

vegetables, fruits, fish ponds, etc., i.e., for produce that is needed

fresh almost every day. These gardens could be reached by foot or

bicycle within minutes, and the quantities needing special transport

would be relatively low. The real agricultural zone, larger farms of up

to 80 hectares (200 acres) or several farms of smaller size, could be

about 15 kilometers or so from the city-bolo. (Particularly in the case

of certain cultures using lakes, peaks, vineyards, hunting grounds,

etc.) These bolo-farms would specialize in large-scale production of

durable foods: cereals, potatoes, soya, diary products, meat, etc.

Transportation would be on the scale of tons (by chariot, trucks, boat,

etc.). For the kodu of larger cities, a system of three zones could be

practical:[14]

[]

For the easy functioning of kodu, the actual depopulation of larger

cities with more than 200,000 inhabitants should continue or be

encouraged by bolos. In certain areas, this could result in a

repopulation of deserted villages. There might be pure Agro-bolos, but,

in general, the ibu would not have to choose between city or country

life. The bolo-farms or hamlets also have the function of country houses

or villas, and at the same time every “farmer” would have a town-house

bolo. With the kodu-system the isolation and cultural neglect of rural

regions can be compensated, so that the rural exodus that is today

ruining the equilibrium of much of the world can be stopped and

inverted. The positive aspects of farm life can be combined with the

intense urban life style. The cities would become more city-like,

livelier, and the countryside would be protected against its ruin by

highways, agroindustries, etc. No farmer would have to stick to his land

and be enslaved by his cows. Every city-dweller would have a “cottage”

in the country, without being confined to campgrounds or monotonous

motels.

yalu

[]

The bolos tend to produce their food as close to their central buildings

as possible in order to avoid long distances for trips and transporta

tion, which of course mean wastes of time and energy. For similar

reasons there will be much less importation of petroleum, fodder and

fertilizers. Appropriate methods of cultivation, careful use of the

soil, alternation and combination of different crops are necessary under

these conditions. The abandonment of industrialized large-scale

agriculture doesn t necessarily result in a reduction of output, for it

can be compensated by more intensive methods (since there is a larger

agricultural, labor-force) and by the preference for vegetable calories

and proteins. Corn, potatoes, soya and other beans can guarantee in

their combination a safe basis for alimentation.[15] Animal production

(which eats up immense amounts of exactly the above mentioned crops)

will have to be reduced and de-centralized, as to a lower degree will

dairy production. There will be enough meat, but pigs, chickens,

rabbits, and sheep will be found around the bolos, in courtyards,

running around in the former streets. So scraps of all kinds can be used

in a “capillary” way to produce meat.

Will the bolo’bolo cuisine be more monotonous? Will gastronomy decay

since the exotic importation and mass-production of steaks, chicken,

veal, filets, etc., will be drastically reduced? Will there be a new

Dark Ages for gourmets? It’s true that you can find a large variety of

foods in A-worker supermarkets: coconuts in Alaska, mangoes in Zurich,

vegetables in the winter, all kinds of canned fruits and meat. But at

the same time indigenous food is often neglected in spite of its

freshness and quality. Whereas the variety of locally produced food is

reduced (for reasons of low output, or because its cultivation is too

intensive under certain economic conditions), there are costly

importations of low-quality, tasteless, lame, pale and watery produce

from areaswhere lahor-power is cheap. It is a fake variety, and for just

this reason the newer French high cuisine has turned to cuisine du

marche, i.e., using food that’s fresh and locally produced. Mass food

production and international distribution is not only just nonsense and

a cause of the permanent world-hunger crisis, it also just doesn’t give

us good food.

Real gastronomy and the quality of nutrition are not dependent on exotic

importations and the availability of steaks. Careful breeding and

cultivation, time, refinement and invention are much more important. The

nuclear-family household is not adapted to these requirements:

meal-times are too short and the equipment too poor (even if highly

mechanized). It forces the house-“wife” or other family members to short

cooking times and simple preparation. In large kana or bolo kitchens,

there could be an excellent (free) restaurant in every block, and at the

same time a reduction of work, waste and energy. The inefficient

low-quality small house hold is just the counterpart of

agro-industrialisation.

In most cases cooking is an essential element of the cultural identity

of a bolo, and in this context it’s not really work but part of the

productive, artistic passions of its members. It’s exactly cultural

identity (nima) that brings foreward variety in cooking, not the value

of the ingredients. That’s why a lot of very simple (and often meatless)

dishes of a country or a region are specialties in another place.

Spaghetti, pizza, moussaka, chili, tortillas, tacos, feijoada,

nasi-goreng, curry, cassoulet, sauerkraut, goulash, pilav, borsht,

couscous, paella, etc., are relatively cheap popular dishes in their

countries of origin.

The possible variety of cultural identities in the bolos of a given town

produces the same variety of cuisines. In a city there are as many

typical bolo-restaurants as there are bolos, and the access to all kinds

of ethnic or other cuisines will be much easier. Hospitality and other

forms of exchange allow an intense interchange of eaters and cooks

between the bolos. There is no reason why the quality of these bolo

restaurants (they might have different forms and settings) shouldn’t be

higher than those currently existing, particularly since stress will be

reduced, there will be no need for cost calculations, no rush, no lunch

or dinner hours (mealtimes will also depend on the cultural background

of a given bolo). On the whole there will be more time for the

production and preparation of food, as that’s part of the essential

self-definition of a bolo. There won’t be any food multinationals, any

supermarkets, nervous waiters, overworked housewifes, cooks on eternal

shifts…

Since the freshness of ingredients is crucial for good cuisine, gardens

near the bolo are very practical (in zone 1). The cooks can raise a lot

of ingredients directly near the kitchen, or get them in five minutes’

time from a nearby garden. There will be a lot of time and space for

such small-scale cultivation. Many streets will be converted or

narrowed, car garages, flat roofs, terraces, decorative lawns, purely

representational parks, factory areas, courts, cellars, highway bridges,

empty lots, all will yield a lot of ground for herb gardens, chicken

yards, hogpens, fish and duck ponds, rabbit hutches, berries, mushroom

cultures, pigeonries, beehives (better air-quality will help many of

these), fruit-trees, cannabis plantations, vines, greenhouses (during

the winter they can serve as an insulation buffer), algae cultures, etc.

The ibus will be surrounded by all kinds of molecular food production.

(And of course dogs are edible, too.) The ibus will have enough time to

collect food in woods and other uncultivated areas, Mushrooms, berries,

crayfish, mussels, whitings, lobster, snails, chestnuts, wild asparagus,

insects of all kinds, game, nettles and other wild plants, nuts,

beeches, acorns, etc. can be used for the cooking of surprising dishes.

Whereas the basic diet can be (depending on the bolo’s cultural

background) monotonous, (corn, potatoes, millet, soya), it can be varied

with innumerable sauces and side-dishes. (If we even assume for the

moment a purely “ecological” minimal-effort attitude.)

Another enrichment of the bolo-cuisine is brought to them by traveling

ibus, guests or nomads. They introduce new spices, sauces, ingredients

and recipes from far countries. As these kinds of exotic products are

only needed in small quantities, there is no transportation problem and

they will be available in more variety than today. Another possibility

for every ibu to get to know interesting cuisines is traveling; since

ibus can take advantage of hospitality everywhere, they can taste the

original dishes for free. Instead of transporting exotic products and

specialties in a mass way, and with the consequent deterioration of

ambience, it’s more reasonable to make now and then a gastronomic

world-tour. As the ibu has all the time it wants, the world itself has

become a real “supermarket”.

Preservation, pickling, potting, drying, smoking, curing and

deep-freezing (which are energically reasonable for a whole kana or

bolo) can contribute to the variety of food all over the year. The

larders of the bolos will be much more interesting than our

refrigerators nowadays. The different sorts of wine, beer, liquor,

whiskey, cheese, tobacco, sausages, and drugs will develop into as many

specialities of certain bolos and will be exchanged among them. (As it

was in the Middle Ages, when every monastery had its own specialty.) The

wealth of pleasures that has been destroyed and levelled out by mass

production can be reclaimed, and networks of personal relationships of

connoisseurs will spread over the whole planet.

sibi

[]

A bolo needs not only food, it needs things. Whatever concerns the

production, use or distribution of things is called sibi. Thus sibi

includes: buildings, suplies of fuel, electricity and water, the

production of tools and maschines (mainly for agriculture), clothing,

furniture, raw materials, devices of all kinds, transportation, crafts,

arts, electronic hardware, streets, sewage, etc.

Like agriculture (kodu), so too fabriculture (sibi) depends on the

cultural identity of a given bolo. A basic part of the sibi will be the

same in all bolos: maintenance of buildings, simple repairs of machines,

furniture, clothing, plumbing, roads, etc. A bolo will be much more

independent than an actual neighborhood or even a family household. As

there is no interest in producing defective, disposable or low-quality

products, there will be fewer repairs. Due to the solid and simple

design of things, repairs will also be easier, defects will have less

severe consequences. The ability to do the basic craftsman’s work in the

bolo itself is also a guarantee of their independence and reduces waste

of energy andtime (electricians or plumbers don’t have to travel across

the whole town). The bolo is large enough to allow a certain degree of

specialization among its members.

The main content of sibi will be the expression of typical productive

passions of a bolo. Productive passions are in turn directly linked to a

bolo’s cultural identity. There might be painter-bolos, shoemaker-bolos,

guitar-bo-los, clothing-bolos, leather-bolos, electronics-bolos,

dance-bolos, woodcutting-bolos, mechanics bolos, aeroplane-bolos,

book-bolos, photography-bolos, etc. Certain bolos won’t specialize and

will do many different things, others would reduce the production and

use of many things to a minimum (Tao-bolo).

Since people aren’t working for a marketplace, and only secondarily for

exchange, there is no longer any distinction between crafts/arts,

vocation/job, working time/free time, inclination/economic necessity

(with the exception of some basic maintenance work.) Of course, there

will be exchange of these typical products and performances between

bolos, as is the case for agricultural specialties. By means of gifts,

permanent agreements, through pools of resources (mafa) and in local

markets they will circulate and will be compared to others at special

fairs.

In the context of a bolo or even a tega (larger neighborhoods, towns),

craftsmen’s or small industrial production will be under the direct

control of the producers, and they will be able to know and influence

the whole process of production. Goods will have a personal character,

the user will know the producer. So defective goods can be brought back,

and there will be feedback between the application and the design,

allowing for the possibility of improvement and refining. This direct

relationship between producer and consumer will yield a different type

of technology, not necessarily less sophisticated than today’s

mass-industrial technology, but oriented towards specific applications

(custom-made prototypes), independence from big systems

(interchangeability, “smallness”), low-energy consumption, easy

repairability, etc.[16]

Since the field for the production and use of things is more manifold

and less subject to “natural” limitations than is agriculture, the bolos

will be more dependent on exchange and co-operation in this sector.

Think of water, energy, raw materials, transportation, high tech,

medicine, etc. In these fields the bolos are interested in coordinating

and cooperating on higher social levels: towns, valleys, cities,

regions, continents — for raw materials, even world-wide. This

dependence is inevitable, because our planet is just too populated and

such interactions are necessary. But in this sector, a bolo can only be

blackmailed indirectly, on a mid-term level. Moreover, it has the

possibility of directly influencing larger communities by means of its

delegates (see dala).

Cooperation in certain fields is also reasonable from the point of view

of energy. Certain tools, machines or equipment just can’t be used in a

single bolo. Why should every single bolo have a mill for cereals,

construction machinery, medical laboratories, big trucks? Duplications

here would be very costly and demand a lot of unnecessary work. Common

use of such equipment can be orgnized bi-laterally or by the townships

and other organisms (see tega, vudo, sumi) with machine pools, small

factories, deposits of materials, specialized work-shops. The same

solution is possible for the production of necessary goods that are not

or can not be manufactured in a bolo (because there happens to be no

shoemaker-bolo in town). So ibus from different bolos can combine,

according to their own inclinations, in neighborhood or city workshops.

If there are no ibus inclined to do such work, and if at the same time

the given community insists upon its necessity, the last solution is

cumpulsory work (kene): every bolo is obliged to furnish a certain

amount of labor to accomplish such tasks. This could be the case for

crucial but unsatisfactory jobs like: guarding shut-down nuclear power

plants, cleaning the sewage system, road maintenance, pulling down and

removing useless highways and concrete structures, etc. Since compulsory

work will be exceptional and based on rotated shifts, it cannot strongly

interfere with the ibu’s individual preferences.

pali

[]

A bolo’s independence is in fact determined by its degree of

self-sufficiency in energy supply. Agriculture and fabriculture can be

considered two methods to resolve this problem.[17] Energy (pali) is

needed for agriculture itself (tractors), for transportation, for

heating and cooling, for cooking, for mechanical applications and for

energy-production itself. bolo’bolo is not necessarily a low-energy

civilization, i.e., low-energy consumption is not motivated by

“ecological” efforts, but a mere consequence of cultural diversity,

smallness, avoidance of work-intensive processes, lack of control and

discipline. High-energy systems afford continuous attention, control of

controllers, reliability, since the risk of breakdowns is high.

bolo’bolo will need much less energy, because it is just a different

life-style — or what is better, a variety of lifestyles, each with a

different energy need.

Local self-sufficiency, communal life in bolos, time instead of speed

will all reduce traffic, the consumption of fuel for heating, and all

kinds of mechanical applications. A large portion of energy is needed

today to bring together things or people which have been separated by

the functions of a centralized system: home and workplace, production

and consumption, entertainment and living, work and recreation, town and

country. Energy consumption rises in proportion to the isolation of

single persons and nuclear families. The size and structure of bolos

permits more achievements with less energy consumption, for different

applications will also complement and support one another. The bolos can

apply the different sorts of energy, each in the best way. Electricity

will be used for lighting, electronic equipment, mechanical energy and

some means of transportation (railroads, tramways). The basic supply of

energy can be produced in the bolo itself (especially for lighting) by

wind generators, solar cells, small river power plants, bio-gas

generators, etc. Passive solar energy, collectors, geothermic systems

can be used for heating and hot water. Fuels are only to be used to

achieve high temperature: for cooking (bio-gas, wood, coal, gas), for

steam engines (trucks, boats, generators), and for some combustion

engines (gasoline, diesels, kerosene for ambulances, rescue planes, fire

engines, emergency vehicles of all kinds).

A bolo is also an integrated energy system, where local and external

resources can be combined. The waste heat of ovens or machines in

workshops can be used for heating, because living and workplace are

identical in about 80% of the cases. A lot of heated rooms can also be

used communally (e.g., baths, hot tubs, drawing rooms, saunas,

“restaurants”). Excrement and garbage can be transformed into bio-gas

(methane) instead of polluting the waters. The size of the bolos

(they’re relatively large for this purpose) facilitates an efficient use

and distribution of energy, since installations and even electronic

control systems are in a reasonable relation to the necessary output.

(Which just isn’t the case in single buildings or family households:

most new “alternative” technologies that are actually applied to single

houses are pure luxury.)

In warm climates, a bolo could be up to 90% energy independent, in

moderate and cold zones between 50 and 80%. The bolos cooperate between

themselves and the rest is taken care of by larger communities like

townships and smaller regions (tega and vudo). On a higher level, the

autonomous regions (sumi) conclude agreements on importation/exportation

of energy (electricity, coal, petroleum). Moreover, there will be a

world-wide coordination for the distribution of fossil fuels (see

asa’dala).

High energy consumption seems to be linked to comfort, a high standard

of living, mobility so will there be “hard times” when it is drastically

reduced? Not at all. Most energy today is used to guarantee the normal

industrial work day, and not for individual pleasures. The rhythm of

this work day (9 to 5 or else) determines peak consumption, the

necessity of a quick and standardized climatization (21 degrees

centigrade and 55% humidity). As work is at the center of everything,

there’s no time for dealing directly with the “energy elements” of fire,

wind, water, and fuels. Climate, the daily and seasonal rhythm that

could bring a lot of diversity and pleasure, is seen as only the source

for trouble, since it disturbs work (snow in the winter, rain, darkness,

etc.). So there is a kind of fake comfort in “environmental control”

that causes an immense expenditure of social effort, but doesn’t really

yield any real pleasure or enjoyment in warmth or coolness. (It’s also

visible in the need for certain people to have a chimneyplace right by

the central heating radiator: warmth isn’t just a certain calculation in

Celsius or Fahrenheit.)

The intercourse with energy will be linked more to natural conditions.

In the winter, there won’t be a kind of artificial spring in all rooms;

maybe the temperature will be only about 18 degrees centigrade in

certain rooms, and only in some realy lived-in rooms or salons will it

be warmer. The ibus may wear more pullovers, live a little close

together, go to bed earlier sometimes, eat more fatty dishes — they’ll

live “winterly”, like Minnesota farmers or those who take ski vacations

in the mountains. The cold per se is not a real nuisance: ask an Eskimo.

Only under the conditions of the standardized work day does it seem

impossible. Winter also means that there is less work (agriculture is

resting), and more time to deal with bread ovens, heating systems,

curling up with books or each other, etc.

Some ibus or bolos can avoid winter problems by migrating to milder

zones, just like certain birds. Since they will be gone for months, this

could be energy efficient in spite of the travel. bolos could have some

hibernating agreements with each other, and vice versa for the summer.

There could be exchanges between Scandinavian and Spanish bolos, between

Canadian and Mexican ones, between Siberian and South Chinese, between

Poland and Greece, between Detroit and Dallas, etc.

suvu

[]

Besides food and energy, water is a crucial element for the survival of

the ibu (if it so desires). Whereas in many parts of the planet water

supply is an unsolved problem, water’s wasted in other parts mainly for

cleaning and disposal (flushing away excrement or garbage). It’s not

used in its specific quality as water (suvu), but for easy

transportation as sewage.

Most of today’s washing, flushing, rinsing, cleaning and showering has

nothing to do with physical well-being or with the enjoyment of the

element suvu. The shower in the morning isn’t taken for the pleasure of

feeling running water, but for the purpose of waking us up and

disinfecting us, making our reluctant bodies ready for work. Mass

production causes the danger of mass infections, and requires hygenic

discipline. It’s part of the A-worker maintenance of labor-power for the

work-machine. Washing, the daily change of underwear, white collars,

these are all just rituals of work discipline, serving as the means of

control for the bosses to determine the devotion of subordinates. There

isn’t even a direct productive or hygenic function to many of such

tasks, they’re just theater of domination. Too frequent washing and

extensive use of soaps, shampoos, and deoderants can even be a health

hazard — they damage the skin and useful bacterial cultures are

destroyed. This disciplinary function of washing is revealed when we

stop shaving during vacations, or change our underwear less frequently,

or wash less compusively. Dirt and the right to be dirty can even be a

form of luxury.

In many parts of this planet the relationship with “dirt” (dysfunctional

substances) is neurotically charged mainly because of our education or

by the disciplinary function of “cleanliness”. But cleanliness is not

objective but culturally determined. External cleanliness is a form of

repression of internal problems. But dirt can never be removed from this

world, only transformed or displaced. (This is particularly true for the

most dangerous sorts of dirt, like chemical or radioactive wastes, which

the cleanliness syndrome conveniently overlooks.) What is removed from

the household as dirt appears afterwards in the water, mixed with

chemical detergents to create an even more dangerous kind of dirt, if a

little less visible than before. For this purpose, purification plants

are built which demand the production of huge quantities of concrete,

steal, etc. — even more dirt, caused by industrial pollution. The damage

(and work) that is caused by exaggerated cleaning is in no sane

relationship with the (imaginary) gain of comfort. Cleaning work not

only produces dirt in the form of polluted waters, but also exhaustion

and frustration in the cleaning workers. (Actually, tiring work and

drudgery is the most important form of environmental pollution — why

should a polluted body care for the preservation of “nature”?)

As the disciplinary functions of washing and most of the large

industrial processes that need water will disappear, the bolos can

reduce the actual consumption of water to at least one third or less.

Small communities and processes are “clean” because all their components

and influences can be carefully adjusted and all substances used in

their specific way. As the bolo is large enough to make recycling easy

and efficient, most “dirt” or “garbage” can be used as raw-materials for

other processes. Air pollution will be low, polllution by regular work

as well, and there is a direct interest in avoiding cleaning work at the

source, since it must be done directly by those who cause it.

Many bolas will be able to achieve self-sufficiency in water-supply by

collecting rain water in tanks or by using springs, rivers, lakes, etc.

For others, it’ll be more convenient to organize water-supply in the

frame of towns, valleys, islands, etc. A lot of bolos in arid regions

will need the help of other bolos (on a bilateral or world-wide basis)

to drill wells or build cisterns. In the past the problem of

water-supply has been resolved under extremely difficult conditions

(deserts, islands, etc.). The actual world-wide “water-crisis” is mainly

due to over-urbanization, the destruction of traditional agricultural

patterns, and inappropriate introduction of new technologies and

products. The use and sufficient availability of water is linked to the

cultural background, not just a technical issue.

gano

[]

bolo’bolo isn’t only a way for the ibu to conquer more time, but also a

way to get more space (gano). Shop roofs, garages, offices, warehouses,

many streets and squares, factory buildings, all will become available

for new utilization by bolos and ibus. Since there will be no real

estate property, no laws for construction, all kinds of private

restictions, speculation, over- and under-utilization disappear. The

bolos can use their buildings as they like, they can transform them,

connect them, paint them, subdivide them, all according to their

cultural background (nima). Of course problems can arise, conflicts over

which bolo gets which buildings and space in general. These problems can

be discussed and resolved in the framework of larger communities

(neighborhoods, cities, even regions), where every bolo is represented

by its delegates (see tega, vudo, sumi). Even if there are serious

disputes, nobody can claim control over buildings he or she doesn’t

actually use. Contrary to today’s property system, this can prevent most

abuses.

The bolos won’t primarily be interested in building new structures, but

in using existing ones in new ways, and in re-using all those

construction materials that have been abundantly accumulated in many

places. The bo-los will prefer local materials, since transportation

requires valuable energy and labor. In this context, forgotten know-how

can prove very useful and should be revived: construction with clay,

adobe, palm leaves, wood, reeds, etc. Construction methods are also

linked to the energy system of a given bolo, e.g., for passive solar

energy, insulation zones, greenhouses, heating and cooling. The

international architectural style of steel, glass, and concrete is very

energy-consumptive, and inappropriate for most climates. The same is

true for standardized, one-family houses, particularly those forming

dull and wasteful suburban sprawls so lacking in communal or cultural

function. New utilization of such buildings or neighborhoods by bolos

are problematic, but still possible by means of certain adaptations and

modifications. Multi-story buildings can be partially topped off with

terraces for planting and provided with glass greenhouses to reduce

energy loss. The colder northeast or northwest sides of large buildings

can be closed off in harsh winter weather, or used as storage spaces or

workshops (heating would require too much energy). Between the stories

of adjacent buildings stairs can be built in order to connect rooms to

larger households (kana).

[]

Suburban one-family houses can be connected by arcades, intermediate

buildings, communal halls, and workshops, and be condensed to bolos.

Other houses will be torn down to make space for gardens and to get

necessary building materials on the spot:

[]

As all bolos can express their cultural identity in their architecture,

the actual monotony of many neighborhoods will disappear. The urban

areas will become lively and manifold again, above all because the

division between downtown areas and suburbs will disappear. There will

be no distinction between cultural and merely reproductive

neighborhoods. At any time (even at night and on Sundays) — some bolos

will possibly stick to such perversities as “weeks” “months” or “years”

— there will be ibus in the streets, at the corners, in the courtyards.

With the regular work-day gone, general periods of rest will also

disappear. There are no stores (except for the neighborhood market: see

sadi) and therefore no closing hours or empty streets. The bolos are

always “open”.

Nesting in, variety, the need for permament transformations and

adaptations to changing cultural identities will give the cities a

rather “chaotic”, medieval, or oriental image (we’ll be reminded of the

times when they used to be lively). Improvisation, provisional

structures of all kinds, a wide diversity of materials and styles will

characterize the architecture. Tents, huts, arcades, overpasses,

bridges, towers and turrets, ruins, hallways, etc., everything will be

very common, since different parts of the bolos should be reachable

without exposure to the weather. Adjacent bolos may opt for common

institutions. Walking will be the most frequent form of travel.

On the whole there will be more space for the ibus than the present

permits. Immense warehouses and commercial spaces will be avaiable, and

a lot of space will be in common use. Every ibu will find room for its

workshop, atelier, studio, exercise room, library, laboratory. The

distribution of living space cannot be regulated by “laws” (for example,

“every ibu is entitled to forty square meters”), since needs are

determined by cultural backgrounds. Certain lifestyles require

dormitories, others require individual cells, others group rooms,

chapels, hammocks, towers, caves, refectories, many walls, few walls,

high ceilings, cross vaults, long houses, steep roofs, etc.

Although the real causes for many forms of social violence (mugging,

rape, assaults) are not exclusively due to the anonymity of today’s

neighborhoods, the permanent animation of public and “private” spaces by

local ibus may be an efficient contribution to make such acts

impossible. The bolos are also the condition for a kind of spontaneous

social control, a sort of “passive police”… The “disadvantage” of a

system that is based on personal contacts consists in being known by

practically everyone, or by being recognized immediately as a stranger.

You cannot easily afford to ruin your reputation… On the other hand,

every bolo will have its own moral standards.

bete

[]

Strictly speaking, it’s impossible to define health care, bete, as a

separate task. Illness or health are not just dependent on medical

interventions, but much more on social factors, on the way of life as a

whole. bolo’bolo itself is the most important contribution to health,

for it eliminates a lot of diseases that are direct or indirect effectsd

of industrial society: traffic accidents, industrialized mass wars,

stress and environmentally induced diseases, many occupational hazards

and accidents, psychosomatic and psychological problems. Work and stress

are the main cause of many diseases, and their reduction is the best

medicine.

The bolo themselves will decide on the definition of health and sickness

(except in the case of epidemics). Like beauty, morality, truth, etc.,

the definition of “well-being” varies with the cultural background. If

some ibus choose ritual mutilations or beauty scars, nobody will try to

stop them. General distinctions between “normal” and “crazy” will be

impossible. The bolos will decide also on what kinds of medicines they

find appropriate for the context of their own lives.[18]

Every bolo will be able to treat simple wounds and frequent illnesses on

its own. It can set up its own bolo-clinic and arrange a permanent team

of experienced ibus who are on call. There might be special rooms for

medical care, a pharmacy holding the 200 or so most frequent drugs, some

beds, emergency kits and special means of transportation. On the whole

the medical help will be faster and better than today, because nobody is

left alone and forgotten.

In a bolo sick and healthy ibus don’t live sepatate lives (all ibus are

more or less ill or healthy). Bed patients, chronically sick persons,

elderly, parturient, mentally ill persons, invalids, the handicapped,

etc., can stay in their bolo and will not have to be isolated in

institutions. The concentration and isolation of persons unfit for work

(that’s been our operative definition of illness) into hospitals, old

folks’ homes, psychiatric hospitals, reformatories, etc., is the other

aspect of the weakness of the nuclear family, one that rationalizes the

distinction between work and household. Even children become a problem

for it.[19]

It’s also possible that certain bolos transform a disease or a “defect”

into an element of their cultural identity. Blindness can become a way

of life for a bolo where everything is specially arranged for blind

persons. Blind-bolos and handicapped-bolos could also be combined, or

there could be deaf-mute bolos where everybody communicates through sign

language.

Maybe there will “crazy”—bolos, diabetes—bolos, epileptic—bolos,

bleeder-bolos, etc. Maybe not. Whereas bolos can be largely

self-sufficient in basic medical assistance, they need more

sophisticated institutions for special cases. In emergencies, heavy

accidents, for complicated diseases and for the prevention of epidemics

there will be a graded medical system that contains also the most

advanced medical techniques. On the level of cities (vudo) or regions

(sumi) the ibus will have access to advanced medical treatment. The

overall expenditures for medical care will nevertheless be much lower

than today. In the rare cases of emergencies, ambulances, helicopters

and planes will be faster than under the present system, and there’s no

reason why they shouldn’t be used.

There are good chances that the ibus will be in better health than we

are today. But there won t be an official medical definition of health,

and longevity won’t be a general value. (Today, longevity is simply an

official value because it means fitness for labor and long use by the

work machine.) There are tribes where life is relatively short but very

interesting in other aspects, and other cultures where long lives are

important cultural values. There are simply different conceptions of

life, different calculations between adventure and length. Some are more

interested in risk, others in tranquility. There can be bolos for each.

nugo

[]

The nugo is a metallic capsule an inch-and-a-half long and half-an-inch

in diameter, secured by a twist-combination lock whose seven-digit

number is known only by its bearer (and maybe his or her best friend):

[]

This metallic container encloses a pill of an immediately deadly

substance. Every ibu gets its nugo from its bolo, as is the case for

taku. The ibu can wear its nugo together with the keys to its property

trunk on a chain around its neck so that it’s always ready for use.

Should the ibu be incapable of opening the capsule and swallowing the

death pill (due to paralysis, injury, etc.), the other ibus are obliged

to help it (see sila).

If the ibu is sick of bolo’bolo’, of itself, of taku, sila, nima, yaka,

fasi, etc., it can always feel free to quit the game definitely and

escape from its (improved, reformed) nightmare. Life shouldn’t be a

pretext to justify its responsibility towards bolo’bolo, society, the

future, or other illusions.

The nugo reminds the ibu that bolo’bolo finally makes no sense, that

nobody and no form of social organization can help the ibu in its

loneliness and despair. If life is taken too seriously, it equals hell.

Every ibu comes outfitted with a return ticket.

pili

[]

If the ibu decides to stick around, it will enter into a variety of

forms of communication and exchange with its (surrogate) fellow-ibus. It

will blink at them, talk to them, touch them, make love to them, work

with them, tell them about its experiences and knowledge. All these are

forms of pili, communication, education, exchange of information,

expression of thoughts, feelings, desires.

The transmission and development of knowledge and cultural identities is

itself part of such a cultural background (nima). Every culture is at

the same time its own “pedagogics”. The function of cultural

transmission has been usurped by specialized State institutions such as

schools, universities, prisons, etc. In the bolos there won’t be such

institutions; learning and teaching will be an integrated element of

life itself. Everybody will be a student and a teacher at the same time.

As the young ibus will be around the older ones in the bolo-workshops,

kitchens, farms, libraries, laboratories, etc., they can learn directly

from practical situations. The transmission of wisdom, know-how,

theories, styles will always accompany all productive or reflective

processes. Everything will be “disturbed” by learning.

With the exception of the basic bolo’bolo terms (asa’pili), there won’t

be compulsory literacy, no “three Rs”. The bolos certainly can teach

reading, writing, and arithmetic to their young ibus if they consider it

necessary to their culture. It might be that certain bolos develop

special pedagogic passions and skills so that young ibus from other

bolos can go there and learn certain matters. Or, if there is enough

consensus in a neighborhood or a city (tega, vudo), a kind of school

system can be organized. But all this will be completely voluntary and

differ from place to place. There will be no standardization of school

systems, no official programs.

On the level of more specialized and larger enterprises (regional

hospitals, railroads, electric power plants, small factories,

laboratories, computer centers, etc.), knowledge can be acquired on the

job. Every engineer, doctor or specialist will have some apprentices,

and deal with them on a personal level. Of course, they can arrange

special courses for them and send them to other “masters” or specialized

bolos. Knowledge will circulate freely and on a practical, personal,

voluntary basis. There won’t be standardized selections, grades,

diplomas, titles, etc. (Everybody can call him or herself “doctor” or

“professor” if it’s their wish to.)

In order to facilitate the circulation of knowledge and know-how,

neighborhoods or larger communities can organize centers of cultural

exchange, markets of knowledge. In such “reciprocal academies” everybody

could offer lessons or courses and attend others. Former school

buildings or lofts could be used for such purposes and be adapted by

adding arcades, colonnades, baths, bars, etc. In the buildings there

could be theaters, cinemas, cafes, libraries, etc. The “menu” of such

academies could also be a part of a local computer information pool, so

that every ibu could also find out where it can get what kind of

training or instruction.

As the ibus have a lot of time at their disposal, the scientific,

magical, practical and playful transmission of capabilities will expand

considerably. Expansion of its cultural horizon will probably be the

main activity of the ibu, but it will be without any formal character.

The disappearance of centralized, high-energy, high-tech systems will

also make superfluous centralized, bureaucratic, formal science. But

there’s no danger of a new “dark age”. There will be more possibilities

for information and research; science will be in the reach of everyone,

and the traditional analytical methods will be possible, among others,

without having the privileged status that they have today. The ibus will

carefully avoid dependency upon specialists, and will use processes they

master themselves.

As is the case with other specialities, there will be certain bolos or

“academies” (nima’sadi) that become famous for the knowledge that can be

acquired there, and which will be visited by ibus from all over the

world. Masters gurus, witches, magicians, sages, teachers of all kinds

with big reputations (munu) in their fields will gather students around

them. The world-wide rules of hospitality (sila) encourage this type of

“scientific” tourism mu A more than can be done under today’s

allowances. University will become universal.

Communication in itself will have a different character under the

conditions of bolo’bolo. Today it is functional and centralized, hardly

oriented towards mutual understanding, horizontal contacts or exchanges.

The centers of information (TV, radio, publishing houses, electronic

data-pools) decide what we need in order to fit our behavior to the

functions of the work-machine.

As. the present system is based on specialization, isolation and

centralization, ifnformation is needed in order to prevent it from

collapse. News originates in the fact that nobody’s got the time to care

about happenings in his or her own neighborhood. You have to listen to

the radio to know what’s happening just down the block. The less time

we’ve got to care about things, the more information we need. As we lose

contact with the real world we depend on the fake, surrogate reality,

that is produced by the mass media. At the same time we lose the ability

to perceive our immediate environment.

By its intensive internal interactions and mutual exchanges, bolo’bolo

reduces the amount of not experienced events and therefore the need for

information. Local news doesn’t have to be transmitted by newspapers or

electronic media, because the ibus have enough time and opportunities to

exchange them orally. Chatting and gossipping on street corners, at

markets, in workshops, etc., is as good as any local newspaper. The type

of news will change anyway: no politics, no political scandals, no wars,

no corruption, no activities by states or big companies. Since there

will no longer be any “central” events, there will no longer be any news

about them. Few things will “happen”: i,e., the everyday media-theater

gets displaced from the abstract media-machine into the bolo-kitchen.

The first victim of this new situation will be the mass press. Not only

does this medium permit little two-way communication (letters to the

editors are just alibis), it causes a big waste of wood, water and

energy. Paper information will be limited to bulletins of all kinds, to

proceedings of neighborhood or city assemblies (dala) and to reviews.

The “freedom of the press” will be given back to the users. There might

be more reviews being published irregularly by all kinds of organisms.

bolos, writers’ collectives, individuals, etc.

The role and use of books will change, too. Mass book-production will be

drastically reduced, because fewer copies will be needed to fill bolo

libraries. Even if there were a one-hundredth scale print run, the

access to titles by individual ibus could be better. With bolo-libraries

an immense waste of wood, work and time can be avoided. The single book

will be of better quality and its value will be more esteemed. It will

be more than just a source of information to be thrown away after use,

as paperbacks often are. Purely technical or scientific information that

should be available everywhere and instantly could be stored in

electronic data-banks and printed out as needed. The book as an object

will become once again a work of art, as in the Middle Ages. In certain

bolos there will be calligraphic studies and illuminated copies and

manuscripts will be written. As other specialties, they could be

exchanged as gifts or at markets.

bolo’bolo will not be an electronic civilization — computers are typical

for centralized, depersonalized systems. bolos can be completely

independent from electronics, for their autarky in most fields doesn’t

require a lot of exchange of information. On the other side, the

existing material and hardware could also be used by the bolos for

certain purposes. Radio, television, computer data-pools and networks

are energy efficient and permit a better horizontal contact between

users than other media. Local cable-TV networks, radio stations, video

libraries, etc., can be installed by local organisms (see tega, vudo)

and remain under the control of the collective users.

When electronics is used by bolos, very little material is needed; there

will be few parallels to the case of under-used home computers today. A

few factories (one or two per continent) could produce the necessary

equipment and manage the exchange of parts. Already at this moment

there’s a computer terminal for every bolo on the planet — no more

production is necessary. The telephone network could also be completed

in such a way that every bolo could have at least one station. This

means that it could be connected with regional or planetary processors

or data-banks. Of course, every bolo would have to decide on the basis

of its cultural background whether it needs such means of communication

or not.

As physical transportation will often be slower, less frequent and of

lower capacity than today (see fasi) an electronic network of

communication could be quite useful. If you want to contact a bolo you

could just make a call — so every ibu could reach virtually every other

ibu. Such a network of horizontal communication will be an ideal

complement to self-sufficiency. Independence doesn’t have to become

synonymous with isolation. For the bolos there’s little risk of becoming

dependent upon technology and specialists; they can always fall back on

their own expertise and personal contacts. (Without bolos and relative

autarky, computer technology is just a means of control by the

centralized machine.)

Quick and extensive information can mean additional wealth for the

bolos, i.e., access to a larger variety of possibilities. Single bolos

can call different “menus” from a data-bank — that is, they will know

how to get certain goods, services or know-how at a reasonable distance

and with the required quality.

Hence gifts, permanent contracts of exchange, trips, etc., all can be

easily arranged without any need of money.

kene

[]

In the contacts with other ibus and bolos, there might arise certain

agreements on common enterprises, not only exchange of information but

also the organization of common work. For every bolo it will be

voluntary to join such enterprises, but of course bolos who choose not

to cooperate will have no right to automatically participate and take

advantage of them. Social organization is a trap; in bolo’bolo, the

price of being caught in this trap can be kene, external, compulsory

work.

Common enterprises like hospitals, energy supplies (electricity), peak

technologies, medicine, the protection of the environment, the means of

communication, the water supply, mining, mass production of selected

goods, big technologies (refineries, steel mills, purification plants,

ship building, airplane construction, etc.) require a certain number of

ibus ready to do such work. It s probable that most ibus can be found on

a voluntary basis, i.e., they might even realize their productive

passions in such enterprises. On the other side, this sector will be

drastically re-dimensioned and entirely determined by the will of the

participating communities. (Ships don’t have to be built; the pace and

quality of work will be defined by those who do it; there are no wages

or bosses; there’s no hurry or profitability.) The industrial

undertakings of the bolos, towns or regions (no longer anything like

“private” enterprise) will be a relatively lame, harmless,

low-productivity affair, and no longer so repulsive for those ibus

engaged in it. Nevertheless, it’s reasonable to organize some industrial

plants or centralized institutions on a larger scale: a middle-sized,

carefully planned and ecologically equipped steel factory is much less

polluting than a melting furnace in every bolo-court.

So, if a certain number of bolos or other communities should decide to

put up such middle-sized enterprises, and if it shouldn’t be possible to

find enough ibus inclined to do such work, what can be done? There might

be a “rest”, and this rest-work (kene) could be distributed among the

participating communities and declared “compulsory”. In return, they

would get the goods or services they produce for “free”. The amount of

kene (social or external work) depends on the situation. Most

traditional societies are acquainted with this system and in times of

crises or when the economic system collapses they return spontaneously

to it if they’re not hindered by State intervention or property

limitations. It’s imaginable that a bolo could give 10% of its active

time (i.e., 50 ibus per day for some hours) to common work in the

township. This community (tega) could pass over 10% of its labor to the

city (vudo) and so on up to planetary institutions. Inside the bolo

there could be a system of rotation or other methods, depending upon

custom and structure. The rest of the work will be mainly unqualified,

dull, but somehow necessary tasks, ones that probably don’t fulfill any

personal vocation. For the ibu as an individual, even work it has

consented to can’t be compulsory; it can always leave, change its bolo

or try to get its bolo out of such agreements. This will all be a

question of reputation — munu. (I mean, doing compulsory work could ruin

someone’s reputation.)

tega

[]

On the basis of communication (pili) and common activity (kene), larger

communities than bolos are possible. The forms of such confederations,

coordinations or other bolo clusters will be different from region to

region and continent to continent. Bolos can also exist alone (in the

jungle) or in groups of two or three. They can have rather loose

arrangements, can work together closely, almost “state”-like. There can

be overlappings, temporary agreements, enclaves and exclaves, etc.

One basic possibility for ten to twenty bolos is to form a tega, a

village, small town, a larger neighborhood, a valley, a smaller

countryside-area, etc. A tega can be determined by geographic

convenience, urban organization, cultural or historic factors or simple

predilection. A tega (let’s call it “township”) will fulfill certain

practical tasks for its members: streets, canals, water, energy-plants,

small factories and workshops, public transportation, hospital, forests

and waters, depots of materials of all kinds, construction,

firefighters, market regulations (sadi), general help, reserves for

emergencies. More or less, the bolos organize a kind of

self-administration or self-government on a local level. The big

difference to such forms in actual societies (neighborhood-councils,

block-committees, “soviets”, municipalities, etc.) is that they’re

determined from “below” (they’re not administrative channels of a

centralized regime) and that the bolos themselves with their strong

independence limit the power and possibilities of such “governments”.

The township can also assume (if the bolos want it) social functions. It

can have organs to deal with conflicts between bolos, to supervise duels

(see: yaka), to found or dissolve uninhabited bolos, organize

township-bolos (for ibus that cannot find a common life-style, but

nevertheless would like to live in a bolo...). In the frame of the

township, public life should be constituted in such a way that different

ways of life can co-exist and that conflicts remain possible but not

excessively ennervating. In the township other forms of life outside the

bolos should find their space of living: hermits, nests of nuclear

families, nomads, bums, communities, singles. The township will have the

task of arranging the survival of such people, helping them conclude

agreements with bolos concerning food, work, social activities,

resources etc. A township will organize as many common institutions as

the participating bolos wish; swimming pools, ice rinks,

mini-opera-houses, theatres, ports, restaurants, festivals, parties,

race tracks, fairs, slaughterhouses, etc. There could also be

township-farms on the basis of common work (kene). In all this, the

bolos will take care not to lose too much of their self-sufficiency to

the township — the first step to a central state is always the most

harmless and inconspicuous…

Schematic view of an urban township (tega):

[]

dala, dudi

[dala]

[dudi]

One of the problems of social institutions — even when they fulfill the

best and most innocent functions — is that they tend to develop a

dynamic of their own towards centralization and independence from their

constituencies. Society always brings the risk of the return of the

State, of power and politics. The best limitation of such tendencies is

the self-sufficiency of the bolos. Without this, all other formal

democratic methods must fail, even the principle of delegation from

below, systems of rotation of seats, publicity, the right to full

information, delegation by lot, etc. No democratic system can be more

democratic than the material, existential independence of its members.

There’s no democracy for expolited, blackmailed, economically weak

people.[20]

Given the autarky of the bolos, certain proposals that could minimise

the risk of statehood can be made. Inside the bolos, there can’t be any

rules, for their internal organization is determined by their life-style

and cultural identity. But on the township-level (and all “higher”

levels) the following procedures could be reasonable (of course, the

bolos of every township will find their own system).

The township affairs are discussed and put to work by a

township-assembly (dala) to which every bolo sends two delegates.

Additionally there will be two external delegates (dudis) from other

assemblies (see below). The bolo-delegates are appointed by lot, and

half of the delegates must be of the male sex (so that there is no

over-representation by women, who form the “natural” majority).

Everybody participates in this casting of lots, even children. Of course

nobody could supervise and enforce such a system; it could only exist as

an agreement among the bolos.

The township-assembly (dala) chooses two dudis among its members, also

by lot. These external delegates will be sent by another system of lots

to other assemblies (other townships, “counties”, regions) of another

level and another area. So a township in Lower Manhattan would send its

observers into the assembly of the region (see: vudo) Idaho, the

assembly of Duchess County would send observers into a township —

asembly in Denver, the region Chihuahua (Mexico) would send observers

into the assembly of a county in Texas, etc. These observers or

delegates have the full right of vote and are not bound to discretion —

indiscretion and intereference in “foreign” affairs are in fact their

task.

Such observers could destroy local corruption and introduce totally

extraneous opinions and attitudes — they’d disturb the sessions. They

could prevent assemblies from developing isolationist tendencies and

regional egoisms.

Additionally, the assemblies of all levels could be limited in time

(election for one year only), by the principle of public meeting, by

transmission on TV, by the right of everybody to be heard during

sessions, etc.

The delegates of bolos would have different statusses and would be more

or less independent from instructions by their bolos. Their mandate

would be more or less imperative — it depends on what kind of bolo they

represent, if its more “liberal” or more “socialized”. They’re also

responsible for the execution of their decisions (this is another

limitation of their bureaucratic tendencies) and their activity can be

considered as a kind of compulsory work (kene).

The dalas of all levels cannot be compared to parliaments, governments

or even organs of self-administration. They’re just managing some social

interstices and agreements of the bolos. Their legitimation is weak

(lots), their independence low, their tasks locally limited and merely

practical. They should rather be compared to “senates” or “houses of

lords”, i.e., meetings of representatives of independent units, a kind

of feudal-democracy. They aren’t even “confederations”. The bolos can

always boycott their decisions or convoke general popular assemblies…

vudo

[]

The bolos will solve most of their problems alone or in their townships

(tegas). But at the same time most bolos will have farms or other

resources beyond township-“limits”. To arrange such things, a larger

coordination of townships could be convenient in many cases. Ten to

twenty townships could organize certain tasks in the frame of a vudo

(small region, city, county, canton, valley).

The size of such a county would have to be very flexible, depending on

geographic conditions and existing structures. It will represent a

functional living area for about 200,000 ibus, or 400 bolos. There would

be very little transportation going beyond a vudo. Agriculture and

fabriculture should be geographically united on this level,

self-sufficient up to 90% or more. Inside a county it should be possible

for every ibu to travel somewhere and to return the same day (and still

have time to do something). In densely populated areas, this could be a

surface of 50×50km, so any ibu could get around by bicycle.

A county could have the same type of tasks as a township, just on a

higher scale: energy, means of transportation, high technologies, an

emergency-hospi-tal, organization of markets and fairs, factories, etc.

A specific task of counties should be to care for forests, rivers,

mountain-areas, moors, deserts — areas that don’t belong to any bolo,

that should be used commonly, and that need to be protected against

damage of all kinds. A county would have more tasks in the field of

agriculture, especially when dealing with related conflicts between

bolos (who’s going to get what land?).

A county can be organized around a county-assembly (vudo’dala). Every

township-assembly could send two delegates (1 male, 1 female) chosen by

lot (see: dala, dudi).

Some counties will have to be of larger size, to deal with cities of

several million inhabitants. These megalopoli pose a special problem,

for their urban bolos (easily formed) will have difficulties becoming

self-sufficient in food. The approaches to this problem will be

manifold. First, the large cities should be thinned out, so that unities

of not more than 500,000 people can be formed. In certain cases, and for

historically interesting cities (New York, London, Rome, Paris, etc.),

this cannot be done without damaging their typical image. In this case

these super-counties have to conclude special agreements with

surrounding counties or regions concerning the exchange of food versus

certain “cultural” services (theatre, cinema, galleries, museums, etc.)

for several regions. On the other side, the outer townships of such

cities could reach full self-sufficiency, and thinned-out areas could at

least guarantee a partial food-supply for the downtown areas.[21]

sumi

[]

The autonomous region (sumi) is the largest practical unity for bolos

and ibus. Such a region can comprise an indefinite number of bolos,

townships or counties, maybe about 20 or 30 counties, or several million

people. In special cases this can be more, or even just several

thousands—as in the case of isolated communities on islands, on

mountains, in the ice or the desert. There are several hundred regions

on this planet; most of them will be known within the same continent.

A region is principally a geographic unity: a mountain area, a region

between two large rivers or mountain-chains, a large island or

peninsula, a coast, a plain, a jungle, an archipelago, etc. It is a

unity mainly as far as transportation and getting around is concerned,

and it should have enough resources to be self-sufficient. Most exchange

and most communication of the bolos will be within the limits of such a

region. It is not an administrative, but an everyday-life, practical

unit. In certain cases it corresponds to actual “states” (U.S.) or

“republics” (U.S.S.R.), to duchies, provinces, official regions (Italy,

France), Länder (Germany) etc. But in many of these cases, these areas

are purely administrative and unpractical. In some cases they’ve even

been created in order to tear apart or crush existing regions based on

cultural, historical or other identities.

Regions are in fact not only geographic areas (in some cases this might

be sufficient), they’re cultural unities, like the bolos. There might be

a common language or dialect, a history of common struggles, defeats or

victories, similar life-styles, housing forms (related to climate

ortopography), religions, institutions, dishes, etc. All this, and some

accidents can form a kind of regional identity. On the basis of such

identities, a lot of struggles in all parts of the world have taken

place in this century and before: the Irish, American Indians, Basques,

Corsicans, Ibos, Palestinians, Kurds, Armenians, etc. The cultural

identity of a whole region might be more diversified and less typical

than the one of a bolo, it can still be strong enough to strengthen a

community. Of course, regional identity can never be a pretext to

suppress bolos and their identity. No region should expel a bolo, and

every adjacent bolo should be free to chose its region. History has

demonstrated that autonomous regions not denied their own independent

culture are very tolerant towards other cultural identities too. In

fact, the self-sufficiency of its bolos is the real strength of an

autonomous region. By “losing” bolos or townships and “winning” others,

a region can continuously adapt to changing situations; there are no

“hard” borders that always cause unnecessary conflicts and wars. A

region is not a territory, but a living area changing with life. In the

form of typical *bolos, *every region has many “embassies” in other

regions (Irish-bolos in New York, Bronx-bolos in Paris, Sicilia-bolos in

Burgundy, Basque-bolos in Andalusia, etc.).

Such flexible regions are also a possibility for solving all those

problems that have been caused by absurd national borders: the existing

nations shaped for the purpose of control and domination will be diluted

in the mass of soft regions.[22]

Specific practical tasks of regional assemblies could be: guarding

shut-down nuclear installations or deposits (mine fields, barbed wire,

rotating guards, MG-towers, etc. for several ten thousand years), the

maintenance of some railroads, boat lines, airlines, computer-centers,

laboratories, energy-exports and imports, emergency aid, help for bolos

and townships, taking care of conflicts, participating in continental

and planetary activities and institutions.

Resources and personnel needed for such purposes can be delivered in the

form of common work by counties, bolos or townships (kene).

Regional assemblies can have the most differing forms. A convenient

solution could be the following: two delegates from each county,

40 delegates from 20 bolos chosen by lot—about 60 members. This system

would prevent the discrimination of minority-cultures (also cultures

that are not “typical” to a region would be represented). Additionally

there would be two observer-delegates (dudis) from other assemblies and

two delegates from each adjacent region. Thus, in the regional assembly

of New York City there would be fully entitled delegates from New

Jersey, Upstate New York, Connecticut, etc. (and vice versa). By means

of such horizontal representation, the cooperation and mutual

information exchange for regions could be encouraged, and they would be

less dependent on superior levels. Several regions could as well form

cooperating groups or alliances, especially in the field of

transportation and raw materials.

In Europe (in a loosely geographic sense) there could be about

100 regions, in the Americas 150, in Africa 100, in Asia 300, and in the

rest of the world 100, about 700 regions in all.

[]

asa

[]

asa is the name of the spaceship “Earth”. The autonomous regions can be

considered the different rooms of this spaceship, and most of them might

be interested in joining the planetary assembly, asa’dala. Every region

will send for this purpose two delegates (1 male, 1 female) to its

meetings, taking place alternating between Quito and Beirut each year

respectively. The planetary assembly is a forum for the regions for

contacts, chatting, encounters, exchange of gifts or insults, concluding

new agreements, learning languages, having parties and festivals,

dancing, quarrelling, etc. Such a planetary assembly or specialized

committees could take care of some planetary hobbies, such as the use of

the seas, the distribution of fossil resources, the exploration of

space, telecommunications, guarding dangerous deposits, intercontinental

railroads, airlines, navigation, research programs, the control of

epidemics, postal services, meteorology, the dictionary of a planetary

auxiliary language (asa’pili), etc. The proceedings of the assembly will

be broadcast world-wide so that all regions know what their delegates or

others are talking about in Beirut or Quito. (Of course, somebody should

ask these two cities whether they’d like to be hosts to such a crowd.)

A planetary assembly and its organisms can only do what the

participating regions let them do. Whether they take part in it depends

on their own interests. Any region can retire from planetary organisms

and do without its services. The only basis of the functioning of

planetary enterprises are the interests and passions of the regions.

When agreements are not possible, there are problems. But due to the

multiple networks of self-sufficiency, the situation should never become

dangerous for a single region. In this regard factors like the

reputation of a region, its historic connections, its cultural identity,

personal relationships will be as important as “practical”

deliberations. (Nobody knows what “practical” really means.)

Planetary institutions will have very little influence on the

everyday-life of bolos or regions. They will deal with a certain amount

left-overs that cannot be dealt with by local communities or that have

no influence on any single region at all (seas, polar areas, the

atmosphere, etc.). Without firmly establishled self-sufficiency for the

regions, such a world confederation would be a risky experiment, and

could become a new form of domination, a new Work-and-Power-Machine.

buni

[buni]

The most common and frequent form of exchange of things between ibus or

communities are gifts — buni. Things or time (for mutual help, services)

are not necessarily scarce, and the best way to deal with this abundance

is waste in the form of gifts. As everyday contacts will be intensive,

there will be many occasions for gifts.

Gifts have many advantages for both taker and giver. As the one who

gives something determines its form and quality, it’s a kind of personal

cultural propaganda, an expansion of his or her identity onto others. A

gift will remind the user of the giver, and so benefit the giver’s

social presence, reputatlon and influence. The exchange of gifts reduces

the work invested in the exchanging process: since they’re independent

from their value, you don’t have to make those calculations

(labor-time). You can give spontaneously, no time is needed for

complicated bargaining or agreements for return. The circulation of

gifts can be compared to the rules for hospitality: giving tends to be

profitable in the long-run, much more than quick, impersonal acts of

buying or selling (because you forget easily the face of a supermarket

cashier, there’s no social advantage in such a transaction). In a

relatively closed, local and personalized frame, gifts will be the ideal

form of exchange of things. (This could be extended to the whole process

of communication: words are also gifts… but, of course, some people

count them!)

The importance of gifts will depend on the local situation. Since they

tend to be spontaneous, irregular, unreliable, such bolos insisting on

reliability and stability would use other, more conventional forms (see

below). Some cultural backgrounds are less compatible with fluctuations,

others more.

mafa

[mafa]

The mafa is a socially organized system of gifts (buni). Its basic idea

is that a common pool of reserves and resources can give participating

individuals and communities more security in case of emergencies,

catastrophies, temporary setbacks. Such a pool can be organized by

townships, counties, etc., to help the bolos in moments of crisis. A

township (tega) would have depots of basic food (cereals, oil, milk

powder, etc), fuels, medicine, spare parts, clothing, etc. Any bolo

could get such goods when it needs them, independently from its own

contributions. Common pools are a kind of net under the bolos, should

self-sufficiency fail.

This kind of common reserve with distribution according to need is in

fact similar to today’s systems of social security, pensions, insurance,

etc. So mafa is the “socialist” face of bolo’bolo. Such systems bear the

risk of creating dependencies on central bureaucracies, and thereby

weaken communities. But in the case of mafa, such social mutual help

would be directly organized by those who can get it: it would be under

local control and its size would be determined by bolos, townships, etc.

Any abuse would be impossible, since help is always given in material

forms, never in the form of money.

Help from common pools will be particularly important in the early

period of bolo’bolo, when the damages of the past (our present) will

have to be repaired. In the first place there will be many bolos without

problems, since they are just beginning to build the basis for

self-sufficiency. So free material help can help solve the problems of

“transition”, particularly in the Third World.

feno

[feno]

Most bolos will need or desire a larger variety of goods than they can

produce on their own. Some of these goods (or services) might even be

needed on a regular, long-term basis and for this reason simple gifts or

help from common pools would not be appropriate. For this kind of

regular, permanent and mutual exchange, the bolos will conclude barter

agreements (feno).

Barter agreements complement self-sufficiency and reduce work, since

less specialization within a bolo is needed, and since certain

large-scale production units are more efficient and even less

detrimental to the natural environment.

They will be used for the exchange of necessary, basic and permanently

needed goods, like foods, textiles, repair services, raw materials,

etc.[23]

The number, importance and type of such agreements will vary according

to a bolo’s inner organization and its cultural background. Cultural,

personal or other relationships will determine the choice of a partner

much more than purely objective categories (like the terms of trade,

quality, distance, etc.).

To make the system of barter agreements more flexible, computer networks

could be used. “Offers” could be stored in data-pools which could be

consulted by others who’re looking for a certain product. Quantity,

quality, and optimal transportation could be calculated automatically.

Such local or regional barter systems could help avoid temporary over-

or under-production. With the help of more sophisticated programs, the

computer could also produce prognoses and foresee impending shortages —

it could make planning possible. But of course the bolos or other

participating communities still decide on their own whether or not they

wish to connect to such a system, and whether they’ll accept the

computer’s recommendations. With time, the barter agreements will form a

well-balanced, tightly knit and reliable network of exchange that can

also continuously be adapted to changing circumstances. To minimize

transportation expenditures (this is one of the main limitations of the

system), exchanges of large quantities or high frequencies will be

concluded among nearby bolos. If a bolo has 500 barter agreements, 300

could exist with adjacent bolos or bolos of the same township. Adjacent

bolos could also be so intensively connected that they’ll form bi-bolos

or tri-bolos, or bolo-clusters. The more distant a bolo-partner is, the

more refined, lighter and less frequent will be the goods concerned.

From far-distant bolos only typically local specialties in low

quantities will be exchanged (e.g., caviar from Odessa, bourbon from

Louisville, tea from Sri Lanka, etc.)

Barter agreements can also exist between townships, counties or even

regions, and there can also be “vertical” agreements between bolos and

townships, etc. Extra-township agreements will be coordinated in order

to avoid parallel transport of identical goods.

sadi

[sadi]

[]

Gifts, common pools and barter agreements, combined with

self-sufficiency, drastically reduce the need for economic — i.e.,

value-calculating — excahnge. The diversity of cultural identities

destroys the basis for mass production, hence also the emergence of mass

marketing. The invested amount of labortime will be difficult to

compare, and exact measurement of exchange-value (through money) will be

almost impossible. Nevertheless it might occur that certain ibus (they

still have their property container, taku) or bolos could be interested

in this type of calculated exchange, for certain purposes. This is the

function of local markets, sadi. These markets complement the

possibilities of exchange, determining a small part of the existential

bases of bolos.

Under these conditions, the circulation of money is not dangerous, and

it can’t develop its “infecting” effects — money will remain a means

only in a narrow frame.

Most townships or counties (cities) organise daily, weekly or monthly

markets, regions hold periodical fairs. The townships or cities

establish special halls (former factory buildings, warehouses, hangars,

etc.) for their markets, so that they can be held in winter or when it

rains. Around the markets a whole series of social activities like bars,

theaters, cafes, billiard halls, music halls, etc. may develop. The

markets will be — as the bazaars — meeting points, spaces for social

life and entertainment. Markets are at the same time “pretexts” for

centers with a communicative function.

Markets will be organized and supervised by a market committee

(sadi’dala). These committees will determine, according to decisions of

the respective assemblies, what goods can be brought to the market and

under what conditions. Markets are ideal for non-essential, easily

transportable, rare, durable, and highly sophisticated products. Such

goods will often have a unique character, will be individual

constructions, specialties, delicacies, drugs, jewelry, clothing,

leather goods, works of “art”, rarities, curiosities, books, programs,

etc. If you need such items you cannot depend on gifts, and they’re not

appropriate for long-term barter agree ments, either. If there is a

computer databank, it might be possible to get them by using the

electronic market.

As there won’t be any international currencies, local markets will have

their own, non-convertible money, or maybe chips like in a casino. The

single buyers or sellers will enter such a market without any money and

open a credit account at the office of the market committee (again, an

easy arrangement through use of computers). So they would get 100 or

1000 shillings, florins, pennies, dollars, ecus, pesos, rubles, etc.

that they owe the market bank. With this money, they can buy and sell

until the end of the market in the evening. Then they return their

chips, and a positive or negative balance is recorded under their name

until the next day, etc. These balances cannot be transfered toother

markets. The accumulation of too-big balances (fortunes) can be made

difficult by programming a random element into the computer, one that

cancels all accounts in periods between, say, a half a year and two

years (this would be a kind of electronic potlatch, or a hebrew

“jubilee”). Since there is no justice apparatus able to punish breach of

contracts, any kind of business would be very risky. All this doesn’t

completely ban the circulation of money, because the ibus could still

take refuge in gold or silver. In isolated townships, the local currency

could circulate without any problems. It’s self-sufficiency and other

forms of exchange that keep money in certain limits (as was the case in

the Middle Ages).[24]

fasi

[]

Is the ibu a settled or a nomadic being? In its (imaginary) history it

appears as steppe horseman and as builder of cathedrals, as farmer and

as gypsy, as gardener and as globetrotter. The bolos presuppose a

certain degree of settledness (because of agriculture), and a society of

pure hunter-gatherers will only be possible when the world population is

drastically reduced (to some million ibus). Nevertheless, bolo’bolo

should bring back to every single ibu free movement across the whole

planet. There won’t be any forced settledness for nomadic bolos or

gangs, no programs of modernization and industrialization.

A single ibu only feels comfortable when it can be sure that it can

leave at any moment for Patagonia, Samarkand, Kamchatka, Zanzibar,

Alaska or Paris. This will be possible because all bolos will be able to

guarantee hospitality to any traveler (sila). There won’t be lack of

time (no ibu must be afraid of lack of money), so travel can be more

leisurely. Today’s immense waste of energy can be reduced because

traveling won’t be a question of getting as far as quickly as possible.

You won’t need charter flights in order to visit South America or West

Africa for just three weeks. Travelers won’t be stressed tourists.

The bolo’bolo system of transportation and traveling (fasi) will be

oriented towards eliminating transportation of mass goods and commuters,

by means of local production and living and working in the same

township. Commuter traffic, mass transportation, tourism, all will

disappear; the major means of transportation will be used primarily for

people who enjoy traveling. Traveling is a pleasure in itself, and

there’s no substitute for it. But lettuce hardly enjoys the trip from

California to New York.

Since most of the ibu’s activities take place in the bolo or township,

most changes of place by ibus can be achieved on foot. The townships

will be pedestrian areas with many passages, bridges, arcades,

colonades, verandahs, loggias, paths, squares, pavillions. Unhindered by

traffic lights (there’s almost no car traffic), the ibu will get around

with as much ease and more simply than it can today, and wherever it

wants. And above all, with little stress. Up to the limits of the county

(vudo) the bicycle will be the ideal means of transportation. To this

purpose, townships or cities can organize bicycle pools. In combination

with an ibu, the bicycle is the most energy-advantageous means of

transport (fuel is delivered to the ibu in the form of food, anyway).

Yet this means a well-organized system of (small) roads to be

maintained. In mountainous areas, during bad weather and in winter, it

is impractical. When there is enough snow the ibu can get around on

skis.

In mountainous areas and in the country, animals are very efficient,

particularly when their fodder grows right by the side of the road:

horses, mules, donkeys, yaks, ponies, camels, oxen, dogs, elephants,

etc. Also in cities horses and mules (less fastidious as to nutrition,

but requiring more handling experience) can be useful in certain

conditions. (Especially for transport between town buildings and the

agricultural bases of a bolo, when too the fodder wouldn’t have to be

brought to town for them.) But in the city itself the ibu (+bicycle,

+skis, +sled, +skates, +etc.) is the ideal means of transportation — the

autonomobile.

The bicycle can also be used for transportation of small goods,

particularly in the form of rikshaws or trailers. A pentadem can

transport five persons and an additional 350 kilograms of cargo:

[]

Compared to the bicycle, even such means of public transportation as

trolleys, tramways or subways are relatively expensive, since they need

an elaborate infrastructure (tracks, cables, wagons). But it could still

be reasonable for an urban area to operate a reduced network, especially

when electricity is locally or regionally available. In a middle-sized

city, three transversal lines would be sufficient, since you could reach

all bolos within an hour using a bicycle from the stops of such a

tramway or bus network:

[]

The street system, maintenance of which is very labor intensive (pouring

asphalt or concrete, fixing potholes, etc.), can be reduced so that

there is only one road to every bola or farm. Most roads in the cities

will be superfluous, and most country roads and highways can be narrowed

to one or two lanes. The remaining automobile traffic will be slow and

unimportant. There will still be some tru As (operated with bio-gas,

steam, wood, gasoline), some buses, ambulances, fire-engines, special

transports.

[]

Some motorways can be used as race tracks for entertainment. A

200 kilometer (120 miles) highway could be reserved for such purposes.

At both ends car parks, where you could choose a fast sports car.

Without any speed limits, the drivers could then drive back and forth

between the two ends of the speedway. So those ibus who like driving

fast and who use the car as a means of entertainment and risk could

still do it. Such a speedway would be less costly than today’s car

traffic, in spite of expenditures for gas, ambulances, medical care, car

maintenance, etc.

If the ibu wants, it can get by bicycle from Cairo to Luanda, from New

York to Mexico City, from New Delhi to Shanghai. But it could also take

local and regional means of transportation operated by counties and

regions (sumi). In many cases, these will be slow — railroads (steam-,

electricity-, or coal-powered) that aren’t terribly frequent and that

stop at every station. There will also be navigation on canals, along

coasts. There will be buses.

What kinds of connections are available will depend entirely upon the

regional communities and the geographic conditions (deserts, mountains,

swamps). In an average region, you would possibly find not much more

than two lines of public transportation:

[]

When an ibu wants to travel far, it’ll go to the nearest station of the

intercontinental railroads, which are operated by a commission of the

planetary assembly (asa’dala) and which form a kind of backbone of

continental transportation. The rail system would be about like this:

[]

This transcontinental railroad network can be based on existing tracks,

with only a few supplementations and adaptations. To make traveling more

comfortable, the Russian broad track could be introduced. With the

transcontinental railroad, the travelers can basically get from East to

West and from North to South, from Helsinki to Capetown, from Lisbon to

Vladivostok, from Anchorage to Rio Gallegos and from New York to San

Francisco. Where the tracks end, the travelers can board ocean steam

liners (Vladivostok to San Francisco, Lisbon-New York, etc.). For sea

transportation, energy problems are unimportant; coal, petroleum, etc.

can be easily transported on the ships themselves, and sails could be

used additionally.

The planetary assembly or regional coalitions will operate international

airlines, too. They’re important for distant islands, for deserts, for

jungles, in polar regions, etc. There will be much less need for flights

than today, and flights are after all in most cases too expensive with

respect to fuel and infrastructures. The lack of many of these will not

be a real disadvantage, since traveling won’t be a quick means to an

end, but an entertainment in itself. There will be enough planes for

urgent transport (ambulances, medicines, spare parts, funerals, etc.).

As all ibus will be able to travel (not only the rich ones, like today),

tight personal relation ships between distant bolos will develop; new

ideas will spread easily, friendships, love affairs, pregnancies,

projects, fancies, and cultural identities will link them. In spite of

the relative slowness of traffic, planetary exchange will be more

intense and generalized than to day. The ibus from different continents

will deal with each other on the same level; “tourism” will be inverted:

Bantus in Berlin, Quiche Indians in Peking, Mongols in Paris, Tamils in

Detroit, etc. The planet will become a mutual anthropological museum.

yaka

[]

Is the ibu a good-natured, love-starved nice being, or is it

quarrelsome, reserved, violent? Is it only aggressive because the

nightmare of work and repression has made it envious, frustrated and

irritable? This might be true. And yet there might also be jealousy,

offended pride, destructivity, antipathy, lust and murder, megalomania,

obstinacy, aggressivity, towering rage, running amok. At least such

desires cannot be excluded at the outset. That’s why yaka will be

necessary for bolo’bolo. yaka makes possible quarrels, disputes, fights,

and war.[25] Boredom, unlucky-in-love stories, madness, misanthropy,

deceptions, conflicts around honor and life style, even ecstasy can lead

to yakas. They can take place between:

ibus and bolos

bolos and bolos

tegas and ibus

bolos and tegas

bolos and vudos

ibus and sumis

vudos and sumis

etc.

Like other forms of exchange (in this case, of physical violence), yakas

(fights) can be regulated by certain common agreements, in order to

limit danger and risk. It will be one of the tasks of the township

assemblies and county committees to help the ibus and bolos maintain the

yaka codex:

A formal challenge must take place in the presence of at least two

witnesses;

A challenge can always be refused;

The respective assemblies (yaka-committees of bolos, townships,

counties, etc.) must be invited to try for reconciliation;

The choice of weapons and of time for the duel belong to the

challenged;

The type of armor is part of the weapon;

The duel must take place in the presence of a delegation of the

respective committees;

The respective yaka committee provides the weapons for both parties;

As soon as one of the parties declares itself defeated, the fight must

be stopped;

Weapons whose range is greater than the ability to see the white of

the enemy’s eye are prohibited (around 100 yards);

Only “mechanical” weapons (the body, sticks, maces, swords, slings,

spears, arrows, axes, crossbows, rocks) are permitted: no guns, poison,

grenades, fire, etc.[26]

The duel committees get the weapons, arrange the battle-ground, organize

referees (armed, if necessary), take care of transportation and

medication for wounded or dying, protect by-standers, animals, plants,

etc.

If the larger communities (counties, bolos, townships, etc.) get into

fights, the competent duel committees might be forced to considerable

efforts. Damage caused by fights must be repaired by the challengers,

even in case of victory. Duels will almost never be linked to winning

material advantages, since they’re very costly and since the parties

will be obliged to live together afterwards. Most motivations for duels

will therefore be in the field of emotional, cultural or personal

contradictions. They might serve to diminish or increase someone’s

reputation (munu). (In the case of prevalent nonviolent ideologies,

diminish.)

It’s impossible to predict how frequent and how violent and how extended

yakas will be. They’re a cultural phenomenon, a way of communication and

interaction. As they involve many material and social disadvantages

(wounds, damage, ruined reputations), they might prove to be the

exception. But duels and fights are not games, and cannot simply signify

the acting out or “sublimation” of aggressivity — they cannot be

considered a kind of therapy; they’re serious, and real risks. It is

even possible that certain cultural identities would have to die without

permanent or periodic fighting. Violence continues, but not necessarily

history.

Of course, complications are possible. The enforcement of the rules can

make necessary temporary militias, e.g., if a party keeps breaking them.

Such militias develop an interior dynamic and become a kind of army,

which in turn would require stronger militias to control them. But such

escalation presupposes a centralized economic system with adequate

resources and socially “empty” spaces where it can develop. Both

conditions will be lacking.

It’s also possible that an isolated passionate tinkerer builds an atomic

bomb in a deserted factory basement and is about to destroy a whole

township or county while realising his sacrosanct nima (cultural

identity). He’d have some problems getting the sacrosanct materials

without becoming suspect to other people around him. Spontaneous social

control would prevent the worst. But even a crazy tinkerer would be less

dangerous than today’s scientists and politicians…

[1] Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American, Basic Books, 1991, p. 30.

Manufacturing employees in the U.S. now work 320 hours longer a year

than their colleagues in France or Germany.

[2] These corrections are mainly based on the works of Heide

Gottner-Abendroth (Das Matriarchat, Stuttgart, 1991) and Carola

Meier-Seethaler (Ursprunge und Befreiungen, Arche Verlag, 1989). It

seems that there is no inevitable logics of authoritarian development in

agriculture.

[3] These corrections are mainly based on the works of Heide

Gottner-Abendroth (Das Matriarchat, Stuttgart, 1991) and Carola

Meier-Seethaler (Ursprunge und Befreiungen, Arche Verlag, 1989). It

seems that there is no inevitable logics of authoritarian development in

agriculture.

[4] These corrections are mainly based on the works of Heide

Gottner-Abendroth (Das Matriarchat, Stuttgart, 1991) and Carola

Meier-Seethaler (Ursprunge und Befreiungen, Arche Verlag, 1989). It

seems that there is no inevitable logics of authoritarian development in

agriculture.

[5] The dream character of my universe (who knows another one?) isn’t

just a philosophical joke, but rather one of the conclusions of modern

quantum physics. There “is” no world out there to give us a “real”

orientation: reality is just a rhetorical pattern. Michael Talbot

(Mysticism and the New Physics, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981, p. 135)

puts it this way: “In the paradigm of the new physics we have dreamed

the world. We have dreamed it as enduring, mysterious, visible,

omnipresent in space and stable in time, but we have consented to

tenuous and eternal intervals of illogicalness in its architecture that

we might know it is false.” After Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Bell, etc.,

nobody can claim reality for himself in the name of science. Physicists

like Fritjof Capra (The Tao of Physics, Berkeley, 1975) have betrayed

Bacon’s and Descartes’ optimism and turn to oriental mysticism.

“Reality” is a witchcraft formula, as well as “Holy Trinity”. The

realists are the last adherents of an old religion, charming, but naive.

[6] A bolo isn’t just a traditional neighborhood, nor a self-help

network, nor a tribe. It’s true that the number of its inhabitants (500)

corresponds to the minimal number of members of the traditional tribe.

About 500 individiuals form the smallest possible genetic pool of the

species homo sapiens. It seems that this social unit has been typical

for all societies of gatherers/hunterers for millions of years (i.e.,

well before homo sapiens came into being). (Richard E. Leakey and Roger

Lewin, People of the Lake: Mankind and its Beginnings, Avon, 1979,

p. 111.) So it is probable that we could feel comfortable in communities

of this size. Yet, a bolo has many other advantages in the fields of

agriculture, energy, medicine, cultural identity, etc. The number of

500 persons seems to be a kind of upper level limit for “spontaneously”

functioning larger social organisms. It corresponds to the inhabitants

of typical older urban neighborhoods in a lot of countries, to an

infantry batallion, to the capacity of a larger hall, to the size of a

medium enterprise, to a medium-sized school, etc. The reasons are not

purely genetic or traditional.

The number of 500 persons permits a minimal diversity of age, sex,

interests, a basic division of work. At the same time, self-organization

is still possible without special organisms, anonymity is not a

necessary consequence (you can still know personally all members of the

community, but without necessarily being close friends). Age groups are

large enough for social interaction and even endogamy is possible. In an

advanced industrialized country there would be about 200 young persons

(1–30 years), 200 persons in the middle (30–60), and 100 elderly

persons. Age groups (1–9, 10–19, etc.) would comprise between 20 and

40 persons (except above 80 years, of course). In Third World areas,

these numbers would be different at first (300 young, 150 middle,

50 old), but later on adapt to the figures above.

It’s typical for most of the alternative and utopian theorists that they

conceive their basic communities from an administrative or purely

ecological/technical point of view. This is also the case for anarchist

or syndicalist theories and for most utopias. Thomas More in 1516

combines 30 large households into units of about 500 persons (“Thirty

households, fifteen from either side, are assigned to each hall and take

their meals there.” Utopia, Washington Square Press, 1971, p. 59.). The

basic communities of the 19^(th)-century utopians (Fourier, Saint-Simon,

Cabet, Owen, etc.) are mostly larger, because they’re oriented towards

pure autarky. Fourier’s phalansteres are little universes containing all

human passions and occupations. Most modern utopias are in fact

totalitarian, mono-cultural models organized around work and education.

Ironically, some utopian elements have been used for the conception of

prisons, hospitals, and in totalitarian regimes (fascism, socialism,

etc).

In A Blueprint for Suruival (The Ecologist, Volume 2, No. 1, 1972,

quoted in David Dickson, Alternative Technology, Fontana, 1974, p. 140),

the basic units are “neighborhoods” of about 500 persons that form

“communities” of 5000 persons and “regions” of 500,000 persons, which in

turn are the basis for “nations.” Callenbach (Ecotopia, Bantam New Age

Books, 1975) proposes “minicities” of about 10,000 people and

communities of 20–30 persons. In a Swiss study (Bin-swanger,

Geissberger, Ginsburg, Wege aus der Wohlstandsfalle, fischer alternativ,

1979, p. 233), social units of more than 100 persons are considered to

be “non-transparent”, while the Hopi say that “a man cannot be a man

when he lives in a community that counts more than 3000 persons”.

Skinner’s Walden Two (Macmillan, 1948) is populated by 2000 persons, and

the largest crowd in his system is 200 persons. See also Galtung’s

self-reliance communities: 10², 10³, etc. Most utopias are full of

general prescriptions that are compulsory in all their basic dimensions

(clothing, work timetables, education, sexuality, etc.), and they

postulate certain principles of internal organization (democracy,

syphogrants, etc.). Reason, practicability, harmony, non-violence,

ecology, economic efficiency, morality, all are central motivations. But

in a bolo culturally defined people live together and their motivations

are not determined by a compulsory set of moral laws. Each bolo is

different. Not even a perfectly democratic structure can guarantee the

expression and realization of the desires of the participating persons.

This is also a basic flaw of many proposals for self-administration

(block councils, neighborhood-defense committees, soviets, grassroots

democracy, etc.), especially if such grassroot organizations are

initiated and controlled by state or party organisms. Only cultural

identity and diversity can guarantee a certain degree of independence

and “democracy”. This is not a question of politics.

As the bolos are relatively large, there will be subdivisions and

supplementary structures and organisms in most of them. Such problems as

having (or not having) children, education (or better: no education at

all), polygamy, exogamy, relations, etc. cannot be dealt with in such a

large frame. These structures will be different in every bolo (kanas,

families, large households, gangs, single cells, dormitories or not,

totems, etc.).

For many reasons, the bolos aren’t simply tribes — their time has

irrevocably gone. The slogan “Only tribes will survive” sounds beautiful

and romantic, but our unfortunate history shows us that tribes haven’t

survived in most parts of the world, and those that remain are still

disappearing. What we know today as tribes are mostly patriarchal,

crippled, isolated, defensive and weakened structures, and can serve no

longer as practical models. It is true that most properties of an “ideal

tribe” can be applied to the bolo (cultural identity +

self-sufficiency + size + hospitality), but the “real” tribes have left

us in the mess we have now. The tribes (that’s all of us!) haven’t been

able to stop the emergence of the planetary work machine. Once upon a

time we were all good savages, yet here’s this monster civilization.

There’s no reason to assume that the actually surviving tribal societies

would have done better — they’ve just been spared by the circumstances.

Only today we can take care of preventing that the same “mistake” (every

mistake has got to be made once in history... maybe twice…) cannot

happen again. The industrial work-society was not a pure hazard; we’ve

got to face it, learn from it, and no flight into the tribal myth will

help us. The real “Tribal Age” starts just now.

Social organization always means social control — even in the case of

the flexible, loosely defined bolos. When money disappears as a means of

anonymous social control, this control will reappear in the form of

personal, direct supervision, interference, constraint. In fact any form

of solidarity or help can also be considered as a form of social

constraint. Every bolo will have to deal with this inevitable dialectics

of constraint and help in a different way. Personal social control is

the “price” we pay for the abolition of money. Almost nobody will be

able to isolate him or herself and to disappear in the anonymous

interstices of a mass society like the present, except in those bolos

based on conscious anonymity. Society always means police, politics,

repression, intimidation, opportunism, hypocrisy. For many of us,

society will never be supportable and a “good society” is the name of

our nightmare. For this reason bolo’bolo cannot be a homogenous system

for everybody — there will be left-over spaces for small groups,

singles, bums, hermits, etc. Not everybody can live in society. (This

aspect is also missing in most utopias or political ideologies — except

in good old liberal philosophy. bolo’bolo is closer to liberalism than

to socialism… but liberalism alone is as totalitarian as socialism: the

ideology of the dominant.) I’m afraid of bolo’bolo…

[7] It depends on local conditions and on the methods used how much land

will be needed to feed a bolo. According to the data of the Food and

Agriculture Organization (F.A.O.), 100 square meters (119 square yards)

per person, i.e. 12.5 acres per bolo are sufficient (Yona Friedman,

alternatives energetiques, editions dangles, 1982, p. 63). If we take

John Seymour’s figures (The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, Dorling

Kin dersley, 1976), we’d need 4 acres for a “large family”

(10 persons?), i.e., 200 acres for our bolo (in a moderate or cold

climate). Seymour’s approximations seem to be more realistic, but

they’re calculated on the basis of a very small, extremely diversified

farm, thus are rather high. But even with these figures,

self-sufficiency can be attained under unfavorable conditions, e.g., in

a small country like Switzerland with little arable land. (Today this

country attains only 56% self-sufficiency in food production.) Under

better conditions, like China, South Korea, or Taiwan, less arable land

per capita is needed (.32 acres, .17 acres, .14 acres respectively).

Under optimal conditions and methods (as in the case of Taiwan) 74 acres

per bolo are sufficient. Under the assumption that 39 grams of protein

(animal and vegetable) per day and 285 pounds of grains per year per

person guarantee adequate nutrition, all existing countries except

Liberia and Zaire are capable today of producing enough food for their

inhabitants. (Frances Moore Lappe, Jospeh Collins, Food first: Beyond

the Myth of Scarcity, New York, 1977). Thus, self-sufficiency is not a

problem of lack of land or overpopulation, but of organization, methods

and local control over agricultural resources.

[8] The idea of money as a “simple and practical” means of measurement

for exchange is very common among utopians and alternativist theorists.

Some of them complain only about excesses like inflation, the formation

of huge fortunes, its “abuse” for capitalist goals, and they dream of

the re-establishment of money as a solid measure for work. It is typical

that the American utopianist Callenbach doesn’t seem to be aware of the

fact that dollars keep circulating in his Ecotopia just as they did

before. It is nonsense to propose a system of direct, personal and

ecological exchange and to permit at the same time the vehicle of

anonymous, indirect, centralized circulation (money). Money as a general

means of measurement presupposes mass-production (only in this case are

goods measurable and comparable), a centralized bank system, mass

distribution, etc. It is exactly this basic anonymity and

non-responsibility of everyone for every thing that causes and permits

all those mechanisms of destruction of nature and people. As Callenbach

poses these mechanisms as a moral problem (respect for nature, etc.), he

needs a (very sympathetic, very democratic, even feminized) central

State (The Big Sister) to repair the damage done by the system, through

price controls, regulations, laws and prisons (of course, these latter

only “training camps”). What he allows economically he has to forbid

politically: the space for morality is opened. (Thou shalt not…) As for

the restricted use of local currencies in bolo’bolo, see sadi.

[9] sila is nothing new, but rather a return to the old “laws” of tribal

hospitality that have been functioning for thousands of years, much

longer than American Express, Visa or Master Card. In most advanced

industrialized countries hospitality is in crisis, because the nuclear

family is too weak to guarantee it on a longterm basis. In its origins,

hospitality has never been considered as a kind of philanthropy, but was

rather born out of fear of the stranger: he had to be treated in a

friendly manner to prevent misfortune brought upon the clan or tribe. If

the number of guests surpasses a certain level for a longer period of

time, friendliness declines and a certain amount of travelers is

balanced out automatically (to about 10%). sila is a self-regulating,

feed-back process of exchange.

[10] The kana corresponds to a gang of hunter/gatherers which, according

to Leakey, has been the everyday community of mankind (even before homo

sapiens) for millions of years (see note [27]). Considering that we

(including eveybody, from the metropolitan-neon-Zen-cocaine-single

intellectual to the Australian aborigine) have been roaming through the

country in groups of 25 people for millions of years and that only for

the last few thousand years have we been living in families, villages,

towns, practicing agri- and fabri-culture, we can assume that the kana

is something we still have in common. (In any case, it is more “natural”

than the nuclear family.) Like the bolo, the kana is a universal social

form providing a common basis across all cultural barriers.

The patriarchized kana is still alive in different metamorphoses:

school-classes, infantry platoons, clubs, party cells, circles of

intimate friends, etc., and has thus exerted its paleolithic charms in

the work-society. With bolo and kana, we go back very far (50,000 years)

to get strength for this big jump. Consciously exploited traditions are

the basis for future wealth. (Traditional societies usually don’t even

know that they have these traditions, mud less what they’re good for.)

[11] The bolos are not primarily ecological survival systems, for if you

only want to survive it’s hardly worth it. The bolos are a framework for

the living-up of all kinds of life styles, philosophies, traditions and

passions. bolo’bolo is not a life style in itself, but only a flexible

system of limits (biological, technical, energical, etc.). As for the

knowledge of such limits, ecological and alternativist materials can be

quite helpful, but they should never serve to determine the content of

the different life styles. (Fascism had its biological ideological

elements…) At the core of bolo’bolo there’s nima (cultural identity) and

not survival. For this same reason, nima cannot be defined by bolo’bolo,

it can only be lived practically. No particular “alternativist” identity

(health foods, earth shoes, woolen clothes, Mother Earth mythology,

etc.) is proposed.

The crucial function of cultural identity is illustrated best by the

fate of the colonized peoples. Their actual misery didn’t start with

material exploitation, but with the more or less planned destruction of

their traditions and religions by the Christian missionaries. Even upder

present conditions many of these nations could be better off — but they

just don’t know anymore why they should be, or what for. Demoralization

goes deeper than economic exploitation. (Of course, the industrialized

nations have been demoralized in the same way — it just happened longer

ago and has become part of their standard cultures.) On Western Samoa

there is no hunger and almost no disease, and the work intensity is very

low. (This is due mainly to the climate and to the rather monotonous

diet of taro, fruits and pork.) Western Samoa is one of the 33 poorest

countries in the world. It has one of the highest suicide rates in the

world. Mostly those killing themselves are young people. These suicides

are not due to pure misery (even if it cannot be denied that there is

misery), but to demoralization and the lack of perspectives. The

Christian missionaries have destroyed the old religions, traditions,

dances, festivals, etc. The islands are full of churches and alcoholics.

The paradise had been destroyed long before the arrival of Margaret

Mead. In spite of some vulgar-Marxist conceptions, “culture” is more

important than “material survival”, and the hierarchy of basic or other

needs is not as obvious as it might seem, but rather “ethnocentric”.

Food is not just calories, cooking styles are not luxuries, houses

aren’t just shelters, clothes are much more than body insulation.

There’s no reason why anybody should be puzzled if people who are about

to starve struggle for their religion, their pride, their language and

other “superstructural” “fancies” before they demand a guaranteed

minimal wage. It is true that these motivations have been manipulated by

political cliques, but this is also the case with “reasonable” economic

struggles. The point is, they exist. Where should the nima come from? It

is certainly wrong to look for cultural identities exclusively in old

ethnic traditions. The knowledge and rediscovery of such traditions is

very useful and can be very inspiring, but a “tradition” can also be

born today. Why not invent new myths, languages, new forms of communal

life, of housing, clothing, etc.? One’s traditions can become another’s

utopia. The invention of cultural identities has been commercialized and

neutralized in the forms of fashion, cults, sects, “waves” and styles.

The spreading of cults shows that a lot of people fell the need for a

life governed by a well-defined ideological background. The desire that

is perverted in the cults is the one of unity of ideas and life — a new

“totalitarianism” (“Ora et labora.”). If bolo’bolo is called a kind of

pluralist “totalitarianism”, that’s not a bad definition. It can be said

that since the 1960s a period of cultural invention has begun in many —

especially industrialized — countries: oriental, Egyptian, folk,

magical, alchemical and other traditions have been revived.

Experimentation with traditional and utopian life styles has begun.

After having been disappointed by the material riches of the industrial

societies, a lot of people have turned to cultural wealth.

Since the nima is at the core of a bolo, there can’t be any laws, rules,

or controls over it. For the same reasons, general regulations on work

conditions inside the bolos is impossible. Regulated working time has

always been the central show-piece of utopian planners. Thomas More in

1516 guarantees a six-hour day, Callenbach a 20-hour week, Andre Gorz

(Les chemins du Paradis-l’agonie du Capital, galilee, 1983) proposes a

20,OOO-hour work life. After Marshall Sahlins’ research on Stone Age

Economics (1972), the two- or three-hour day is about to win the race.

The problem is who should enforce this minimal working time, and why.

Such regulations imply a central State or a similar organism for reward

or pounishment.

Since there is no state in bolo’bolo, there can’t be any (even very

favorable) regulations in this field. It is the respective cultural

context that defines what is considered as “work” (= pain) in a certain

bolo and what is perceived as “leisure” (=pleasure), or if such

distinction makes any sense at all. Cooking can be a very important

ritual in one bolo, a passion, while in another bolo it’s a tedious

necessity. Maybe music is more important in the latter, whereas in

another bolo it would be considered noise. Nobody can know whether there

will be a 70-hour work week or a 15-hour work week in a bolo. There is

no obligatory life style, no general budget of work and leisure, just a

more or less free flow of passions, perversions, aberrations, etc.

[12] Why not choose an existing international language like English or

Spanish? It’s impossible, because such languages have been the

instruments of cultural imperialism and tend to decompose local

traditions and dialects. The institution of standardized “national”

languages in the 16^(th) and 17^(th) centuries was one of the first

steps of the young bourgeoisie in making transparent the emerging

factory proletariat: you can only enforce laws, factory regulations,

etc., if they’re understood. Misunderstandings or “being stupid” were in

fact among the earliest forms of the refusal of industrial discipline.

The same “national” languages have later become instruments of

discipline on an imperialist level. bolo’bolo means that everybody “gets

stupid” again.…

Even so-called international languages like Esperanto are modelled on

western European “national” languages and linked to imperialist

cultures.

The only solution is a completely random, disconnected, artificial

“language” without any cultural links. So asa’pili has been dreamed up

by the ibu, and no etymological or other research will be able to

explain why an ibu is an ibu, a bolo a bolo, a yaka a yaka, etc.

asa’pili is composed of a gang of 18 sounds (+ pause) found in many

languages in different variants. In English they sound like this:

vowels:

a: “ah” (“farm”)

e: “ey” (“pet”)

i: “ee” (“see”)

o: “oh” (“port”)

u: “oo” (“poor”)

consonants: p, t, k, b, d, g, m, n, l, s, y, f, v (pronounced as in

English)

“l” can also be pronounced like “r”, aspriated and non-aspirated sounds,

open or closed vowels are not distinguished; accent is free. asa’pili

words can be written with signs (see the list in this book); no alphabet

is needed. In the English edition of this book, Latin characters are

only used for convenience — other alphabets (Hebrew, Arabic, Cyrillic,

Greek, etc.) could also be used. The doubling of a word indicates an

organic plural: bolo’bolo = all bolos, the system of bolos. With the

apostrophe (’) composities can be formed at will. The first word

determines the second (as in English): asa’pili, (“world language”),

fasi’ibu (“traveler”), yalu’gano (“restaurant”), etc. Besides this small

asa’pili (containing only about 30 words) there could be created a

larger asa’pili for scientific exchange, international conventions, etc.

It will be up to the planetary assembly to put up a dictionary and a

grammar. Let’s hope it will be easy.

[13] The present and permanent planetary hunger catastrophe is caused by

the fact that production and distribution of food isn’t under the

control of local populations. Hunger is not a problem of local

production, but rather is caused by the international economic system.

Even under present conditions there are 3000 calories of cereal grains

per day for everybody, and additionally the same amount in the form of

meat, fish, beans, vegetables, milk, etc. The problem is that large,

poor masses of people just cannot buy their food (and after their own

bases of self-sufficiency have been destroyed).

Monocultural, large-scale agroindustries and mechanized animal

production seem to be more efficient and productive, but in the long run

they lead to soil erosion and the waste of energy, and they use up for

animal protein production a lot of vegetable foods that are needed for

feeding people. Local self-reliance (with moderate self-determined

exchange) is possible practically everywhere, and is even safer due to

more careful use of the land. It’s obvious that this doesn’t simply

imply the return to traditional methods (which have failed in many

regions). New knowledge in the field of biodynamic methods and the

intensive combination of different factors (crops + animals, animals +

methane production, alternation of crops, etc.) is indispensable for a

new start.

[14] This three-zone model is based on ideas of the German urban

ecologist Merete Mattern. A 15-kilometer large agricultural zone could

feed such a large city as Munich. For this purpose, she proposes two

wood zones (for a good micro-climate) and an intensive compost system.

This means that agricultural self-reliance is also possible in densely

populated areas. But this would imply that every square foot is used,

and that there be no space for waste, experimentation or parks. A more

flexible system of three zones and additional farms would be more

practical, as distance, required freshness and harvest-cycles could be

optimally combined. (You’re not going to grow wheat in your backyard and

plant parsley out of town…)

[15] Soya, corn, millet and potatoes can guarantee minimal alimentation,

but alone they do not represent a healthy type of nutrition. They’ ve

got to be combined with meat, vegetables, eggs, fats, oils, cheese,

herbs and spices. Soya yields 33% more protein per surface unit than any

other field crop. In combination with wheat or corn, the use of this

protein is 13–42% more efficient. Soya can be used for a wide spectrum

of derivative products: tofu, soya-milk, soya curd, tofu-powder, okara,

yuba, soy sauce, soy flour, etc. In Africa the niebe bean is almost as

practical as the soy bean. (Albert Tevoedjre, La Pauvrete-Richesse des

Peuples, Les Editions Ouvrieres, Paris, 1978, p. 85.) One of the initial

problems of local self-reliance based on these crops will be to

reintroduce the regional genetic seed-material that has been replaced by

industrial products which are very unstable and vulnerable.

[16] Alternative or soft technology is nonsense if it’s considered

independently from specific social structures. A single house full of

solar collectors, wind mills and other gadgets is just a type of new and

very costly hobby. Soft technology without “soft society” means just the

opening of a new market for big industries (as is already the case with

home computers) and the birth of a new type of home-industry. bolo’bolo

won’t be high tech, electronic, chemical and nuclear, because these

technologies don’t fit into a fragmented, “irresponsible” system. If

there are factories, they’ll seldom count more than 500 workers. But

it’s certainly possible that for selected products one or two huge

factories per region or continent will remain: for electronic raw

materials, gasoline, basic chemical substances, etc.

[17] In fact, agriculture and fabriculture (kodu and sibi are just two

types of energy supply (pali): kodu provides high-grade energy for

people, sibi lower-grade energy for secondary applications. The question

of the realizability of bolo’bolo can be reduced to the energy problem.

Theories, conceptions, and technologies for alternative energy

production have been developed abundantly in the last ten or fifteen

years (Lovins, Commoner, Odum, Illich, etc.). Most alternative energy

theorists also insist on the fact that energy supply is not a merely

technical problem but concerns the whole of a way of life. But for

real-political reasons such contexts are often concealed or minimized.

This is, e.g., the case in the study by Stobaugh (Stobaugh and Yergin,

eds., Energy Future: Report of the Energy Project at the Harvard

Business School, New York, 1979). With the help of conservation and

improvement of engines and generators (co-generators of heat and

electricity) the authors promise energy savings of about 40%, without

any changes in the standard of living or economic structures. Whereas

the basic energy needs are not criticized, different technical and

organizational measures are proposed to solve the problem. To a certain

degree this is also true for Commoner’s methane gas strategy (combined

with solar energy): the approach is mainly technical (political only in

the sense that it means opposing the petroleum multinationals), and the

energy system is still conceived independent from social changes.

(Commoner wanted to be elected President in 1980.) The individual car,

big industry, individual nuclear-family households, etc., are not

attacked. In the US, 58% of the whole energy supply is used for heating

and cooling, 34% for fuels (cars and trucks), and only 8% for those

special applications where electricity is specifically needed. (Fritjof

Capra, The Turning Point, 1982.) Most energy is used for traffic and for

double and triple heating (the consequence of the separation of housing

and work space). Under bolo’bolo conditions it should be possible to

reduce the overall energy needs to about 30% of today’s amount.

(Friedman, cited in note [28], gets roughly the same figure for his

“modernized farmers’ civilization”.) A thus-reduced energy need can be

produced by hydroelectricity, solar and geothermic energy, solar cells,

the warmth of lakes and seas (using pumps), methane from bio-gas,

hydrogen from algae, wind generators, wood, some coal and petroleum.

Though coal is available in huge quantities and has been sufficient for

many centuries, there are grave arguments against its expanded use: the

carbon dioxide problem, the rain, the dangers of mining, the destruction

of landscapes by strip-mining, transportation costs, etc. There won’t be

a “coal age” nor a “solar age”, but a network of carefully adjusted,

small, diversified, locally adapted curcuits that reduce the overall

energy flow. Even the production of solar energy on a large scale

requires considerable industrial investment (metals, tube systems,

collectors, storage equipment, electric and electronic installations,

etc.) which in turn can only be produced with high-energy expenditures

and involve permanent control work. “Decentralization” doesn’t

necessarily mean independence from big industrial producers — as the

example of the “decentralized” automobile from the “centralized”

railroad shows. Alternative energy systems alone risk introducing a new

type of decentralized industrial home-work, as was the case in the

19^(th) century. Even an alternative energy flow (without much damage to

the environment) might force us to contemplate permanent vigilance and

discipline, leading to the selection of controllers and hierarchies. It

could preserve nature, but ruin our nerves. There’s no other solution

than an absolute reduction and diversification of the energy flow by new

social combinations and life styles.

It would be perverse to consider the reduction of energy supply as a

kind of renunciation. (This is done by Jeremy Rifkin, Entropy, New York,

1980.) Using energy always means work. High energy use hasn’t reduced

work, it has only rationalized work processes and transposed efforts in

the field of psycho-sensorial work. Only a very small part of energy use

goes to replace muscle efforts. (And even these latter are not

disagreeable per se, but only when they become monotonous and one-sided.

In sports, they’re considered a kind of pleasure.) With the exception of

transportation, only a few pleasures are derived from a high non-human

energy expenditure.

For this reason, the means of transportation of people will be oriented

toward pleasurable purposes (see fasi). A lot of ecologists have trouble

imagining a civilization of non-energetic pleasure, and consider energy

reduction a kind of penance (towards nature), even a form of askesis, a

punishment for our “hedonism”. Of course this would be thecase if we

accept energy-saving policies without insistmg on new,

low-work/high-pleasure life styles. Have they forgotten that the most

important pleasures need almost no additional non-human energies: love,

dancing, singing, drugs, eating, trances, meditation, lying on the

beach, dreaming, chatting, playing, massage, bathing… Maybe they’re

fascinated by the mass-consumption culture, preaching an age of

renunciation in order to dominate their inner demons? Indeed, energy

saving is a moral problem if social conditions aren’t attacked in the

same moment. (Morality is everything you’re inclined to do, but you

shouldn’t.)

The industrial energy flow destroys our best pleasures because it sucks

up our time-time has become the greatest luxury of the moment. Energy

eats up time that’s needed for its production, its use, its domination

and control. Less (external) energy means more time and inner energy for

(old and new) pleasures, more love in the afternoon, more savoir-vivre,

more refinement and human contacts. The prophets of sacrifice will be

deluded: we won’t be punished for our “sins”; we’ll enter the low-energy

paradise with pitch-black (ecological) souls.

As the overall energy consumption for mechanical uses will be very low,

there will always be enough energy for heavy work, for agriculture, for

machines. Agriculture presently uses up only 1%-3% of the energy supply

(i.e., the actual, industrialized mechanized form of agriculture). There

won’t be an age of drudgery.

[18] War and medicine, violence and disease, death from outside or from

inside: these seem to be the absolute limits of our present existence.

We’re as afraid of “the others” as we are of our own bodies. And that’s

why we put our confidence in the hands of respective specialists and

sciences. Since we’ve been made incapable of under standing the signs of

our body (pain, disease, all kinds of “symptoms”), medicine has become

the last science with more-or-less intact legitimation. Practically

every technological leap (with the most catastrophic implications) has

been justified by possible medical uses (nuclear energy, computers,

chemistry, aviation, space programs, etc.). Life is posed as an

absolute, ideologically and culturally independent value. Even the most

brutal totalitarian regime that’s able to lengthen the average

lifeexpectancy of its people gets a point. As long as we’re not able to

understand our body, deal with it on the basis of our own cultural

identity, we’ll be dependent on the medical dictatorship, on a class of

priests that can virtually define all details of our lives. Among all

institutions, hospitals are the most totalitarian, hierarchical,

intimidating. If life (in the bio-medical sense) is our main value, we

ought to be building up huge medical complexes, install intensive

treatment equipment in every apartment, provide artificial organ banks,

life-sustaining machines, etc. These industrial efforts could eat up all

of our energy and time: we could become the slaves of optimal survival.

Culture is also a form of dealing with death — of building pyramids

instead of hospitals (the Egyptians weren’t just crazy). Cemeteries,

shrines for ancestors, funerals, these aren’t a mere waste of energy and

material: they save lives (against the life-industry). If we’re not able

to accept death in one form or another, we’ll continue to kill or be

killed. (You cannot be for “life” and against the nuclear holocaust in

the same moment.)

[19] The most dramatic consequence of our health-care system, where both

families (or their rudiments) and big institutions fail, can be seen in

the misery of the AIDS-patients. Needless to say that bolos would be the

ideal places to take care of AIDS-patients, to share the necessary work

and to keep these patients integrated into life. This doesn’t mean,

though, that I’m recommending to “wait” for bolos and to leave them

alone at the moment. On the contrary, it might help to motivate some

people to participate in AIDS-projects knowing that community efforts

for these can also be seen as a type of substruction anticipating

exactly bolo-like patterns. (Actually one of the few really existing

bolo-like communities I’ve heard of so far was a lepers colony in

Nigeria…) Like its counterpart — allergies — AIDS seems to be one of the

symptoms of massified society lacking balanced levels of social exchange

and communication. Whereas the increasing allergies indicate a rebellion

against the demand of constant “readiness” for contacts, the revolt of

overstressed social terminals that are destroyed by exaggerated defense,

AIDS is the collapse of other terminals that were only too ready to

“participate” and couldn’t withstand external impacts. Both

over-communication and under-communication are destructive. In a sense

(and considering all ecological and economic effects) primary social

units like bolos are also the answer to allergies and immune

deficiencies.

[20] Actually the Greek term demokratia designates the rule of the

demes, which doesn’t mean the population, but the clans of citizens,

originally tribal units owning their land for autarky in food (pretty

much of bolo-type, except that there was slavery, of course). Outside

the deme there was no citizenship, autarkeia being the condition of

political sovereignty. Since then, all systems of laiokratia, “ruling of

the masses,” have proved to be fake or extremely shaky and prone to

manipulation by the really sovereign classes. After all, Hitler was

elected.…

[21] The conversion of some US monster-cities like Los Angeles (L.A. is

a lovely city!) from car to bicycle areas and from mass distribution to

self-reliance looks to be an impossible task. But it is less problematic

than the conversion of many European cities; at least in L.A. the

population is not so dense: there’s many single-family houses, large

backyards, a lot of streets (which can be used for other purposes). For

Los Angeles there exist already plans that foresee the condensation of

neighborhoods, the establishment of supply centers, the use of free

space for agriculture, etc. Deurbanization is not a process that has to

be enforced — it’shappening anyway in most industrialized countries, and

is mainly hindered only by the present job and housing structures.

The problem is more difficult to solve in Third World-metropolitan

agglomerations like Mexico City, Lagos, Bombay, etc. These areas are

extremely densely populated by slums, and the villages are incapable at

present of receiving the returning masses. De-urbanization is these

regions must start with modernization of villages so that they’re

attractive from a cultural point of view, as well as able to feed

inhabitants. Centralized, state-enforced “solutions” can easily result

in catastrophies, as in the case of Kampuchea. One of the conditions for

a modernization of villages is the improvement of communication systems.

On the other side, a lot of slum technology can serve as a basis for

self-reliance, especially in the field of recycling and efficient re-use

of waste materials. (cf. Friedman, note 13.) A good example of how a

large metropolitan area can be efficiently linked to the surrounding

region could be Shanghai, where fresh vegetables are available on a

daily basis everywhere.

[22] In these times of rising nationalism, it seems almost suicidal to

talk about the abolition of nations. As we’re told by Marxist theorists

of liberation that nationalism is a necessary step in the struggle for

independence and against imperialism, this proposal seems to conceal a

new imperialist strategy. This would indeed be true if only small

nations gave up their existence, while the huge imperialist

super-nations continued to exert their power. Abolition of nations means

in the first place the subversion and dismantling of the United States

and the Soviet Union, the abolition of the two blocs; without this,

eveything else would be pure art pour l’art. There are centrifugal

tendencies in both superpowers, and this decomposition shoud be

supported by any means. The main element of anti-nationalism is not a

kind of pale internationalism, but the strengthening of regional

autonomy and cultural identity. This is also valid for small nations:

the more they start repressing their cultural minorities for the sake of

“national unity”, the weaker they will be and the more central the

superpowers will remain. (We also must consider representations of

concrete hope for the oppressed minorities in the super nations.)

A lot of mistakes have been made concerning the so-called question of

“nations”. The socialists believed in the overcoming of nationalism by

the development of an internationalized modern industrial civilization,

and considered cultural autonomy an excuse for backwardness. Confronted

with this socialist “utopia”, most national working classes have

preferred reactionary nationalism. Fascists, bourgeois parties,

nationalistic regimes were able to exploit the fears of the working

classes of a socialist world-state that would take away even their small

spaces of ethnic tradition. The working classes also have come to

realize that this socialist “modernism” was another name for a more

perfect planetary work-machine.

The problem is not nationalism, but state-ism. There’s nothing wrong

with speaking one’s own language, insisting on traditions, history,

cuisine, etc. But as soon as these needs are linked to a hierarchical,

armed, centralized state organism, they become dangerous motivations for

chauvinism, the despising of diversity, prejudice — they’re elements of

psychological warfare. To call for a State in order to protect one’s own

cultural identity has never been a good deal: the costs are high and the

same cultural traditions are perverted by its influence. Ethnic cultures

were almost always able to live peacefully together as long as they kept

States at a distance. Jewish and Arab communities have been living

together without major problems in Palestine, in the Marais, even in

Brooklyn, so long as they didn’t try to organize into states. Of course

it’s not the Jews’ mistake to try the idea of their own state; their

communities in Germany, Poland, Russia, etc. had been attacked by

states, and they had “no choice” but to organize in the same way.

State-ism is like an infectious disease. After the establishment of the

state of Israel, the Palestinians now have the same problem the Jews had

in Germany. It’s nobody’s fault — but the problem remains. No solution

lies in asking who started it; neither a Jewish or Palestinian state can

solve it, and no real-political instruments seem to be in sight. Some

autonomous regions (sumi) with counties or bolos of Jews, Arabs, Druse,

and others could solve the problem, but only if it’s solved the same way

all over the world. What’s happening in the Near East now can happen

everywhere at any moment. Beirut is just a dress rehearsal for New York,

Rio, Paris, Moscow…

[23] feno is a barter system without the circulation of money. This

doesn’t necessarily prevent it from being subject to economic logic. To

the same degree as barter partners take into account in their exchange

proportions how much working time is contained in the objects, feno gets

completely economized, and could as well be performed more efficiently

again with money. That’s why there are in the United States (under the

impact of recessions) computerized barter-firms, making business on a

billion dollar level (for 1982: $15-$20 million) without moving a single

dollar. Besides tax fraud, these systems have a lot of advantages, but

remain completely inside the economic framework. Another way of barter

is practiced by some people in a small region around Santa Rosa, north

of San Francisco: they work for each other, get a check for their

working time, and can make up to 100 hours of “debts”. An office then

coordinates these mutual services. Such co-op systems are also known

from the Depression of the 30’s. Though no money circulates, the

exchange remains entirely economic, for in fact there’s no difference

whether you write on a piece of paper “1 hour” or “1 dollar” — maybe the

graphics are more sophisticated in the latter case. Bartering might

reduce anonymity to a certain degree, preventing some excesses in the

money economy, but it doesn’t mean its abolition. Only in combination

with cultural values, and due to a high degree of self-sufficiency, can

bartering be prevented from becoming an important economic element.

Barter exchanges in bolo’bolo will mostly come into being because two

bolos have something in common on the cultural level: common relations,

religions, music, food, ideologies. Jews, e.g., buy their food only in

Jewish stores, not because it’s cheaper or better, but because it must

be kosher. A lot of goods will be culturally determined already, due to

the way they’re produced, and can only be useful for people with the

same cultural preferences. Since there won’t be much mass production,

there won’t be anonymous mass distribution and marketing. Exchange will

be uneconomic, personal; the comparison of invested working time will be

secondary. Since these conditions do not exist today, there are now no

real fenos. The measurement of necessary working time will become almost

impossible, since waged labor will be abolished and there won’t be any

adequate measurement of socially necessary labor for a given product.

(How can you know how much work is needed “effectively” for a given

production process if this process takes place in manifold and

incomparable forms? Without big industry there is no safe value.) Value

will always be around as long as there is social exchange, but under

certain circumstances it can become unstable, inexact, unimportant.

[24] In some utopias or alternativist conceptions we find illusionary

money systems which imply that with different forms of money the

problems of monetary excesses could be solved. So-called work-money

(work time instead of marks, francs, dollars, etc.) is just plain money

(as Marx showed in the case of Owen’s system). The prohibition of

interest, or self-depreciating money (as proposed by the Swiss Silvio

Gesell), or the exemption of land from property, all presuppose a

powerful central State to control, punish, coordinate, in other words,

the continuation of social anonymity and basic irresponsibility. The

problem is not money (or gold, or silver) but the necessity or

desirability of economic exchange in a given social context (see note

21). If such an exchange is desirable, there will be money (or

electronic accounts, or chips, or just memory). As economic exchange is

minimized in bolo’bolo, money can’t play an important role. (It won’t

have to be prohibited; who could do it, anyway?)

[25] Since the ibu has emerged, we’ve gotten rid of “man”, and, luckily,

gotten rid at the same time of all those questions like: is “man”

violent or non-violent, is he “good” or “bad” by “nature” (we’ve gotten

rid of “nature”, too). All these definitions of that strange being

called “man” — particularly the humanistic, positive ones — have always

had catastrophic consequences. If “man” is good, what shall we do with

those who are (exceptionally, of course) bad? The historic solution has

been to put them into camps and “re-educate” them. If that fails —

they’ve had their chance, after all — they were put into psychiatric

hospitals, shot, gassed, or burned. Thomas More knew “man”, but he

wanted to punish adultery with the death penalty in his humane utopia.

We prefer not to know. So the ibu can be violent, it can even get

pleasure out of direct, personal attacks on other ibus. There are no

normal ibus.

It is pure demagogy to explain the phenomenon of modern wars by the

existence of interpersonal violence. Nothing is more peaceful,

non-violent, and gentle than the inside of an army; soldiers help each

other, share food, support each other emotionally, are “good comrades”.

All their violence is manipulated, focused on an enemy. Even in this

case feelings are not very important. War has become a bureaucratic,

industrialized, anonymous procedure for mass disinfection. Hatred and

aggressivity would only disturb the technicians of modern war, could

even prevent them from making war. War is not based on the logic of

violence, of feeling, but on the logic of statehood, economies,

hierarchical organization. In its form it can better be compared to

medicine: the unemotional dealing with dysfunctional bodies. (Compare

the common terminology: operations, theaters, interventions,

disinfections, surgical strikes. And the parallelism in hierarchies.)

But if under the term “war” collective, passionate, direct violence is

meant, yaka is a way of making it possible again. Possible, because it

won’t be necessary and therefore can never assume catastrophic

dimensions. Maybe for similar reasons Callenbach introduces a kind of

neolithically styled war-ritual in his Ecotopia (p. 91). But this takes

place outside of everyday life and is a kind of officially supervised

experiment. “Real” wars, as are possible with yaka, are not compatible

with Ecotopia: what are they afraid of? And of course women are excluded

from his war games, because they’re non-violent by nature. Another

typically male myth…

[26] But will such a set of war rules be respected? Won’t “violence”

just sweep away all inhibitions and rules? This fear is typical for a

civilization where direct violence has been banned for centuries in

order to preserve bureaucratized state-violence. Since violence will be

an everyday experience, people will learn to deal with it in a rational

way. (The same is true for sexuality, hunger, music, etc.) Rationality

is linked to redundancy: events that occur seldom lead to catastrophic

reactions. War rules were effective in the times of the ancient Greeks

and Romans, in the Middle Ages, among American Indians, in many other

civilizations. Only under the influence of poor communications among

peoples could catastrophes like Caesar, Genghis Khan, Cortez, etc.

occur. bolo’bolo will exclude such historic accidents: communication

will be universal (telephone, computer networks, etc.) and the rules

will be known.