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Title: The Period of Decline
Author: Miguel Amorós
Date: September 8, 2017
Language: en
Topics: Jaime Semprun, capitalism, crisis, globalization, nihilism, postmodernism, terrorism
Source: Retrieved on 11th May 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/period-decline-miguel-amor-s
Notes: Notes for a presentation of Jaime Semprun’s The Abyss Repopulates Itself, delivered at the Gijon Anarchist Book Fair on September 8, 2017. Translated in January 2018 from the Spanish original. Source of the Spanish text: http://kaosenlared.net/la-fase-crepuscular/][kaosenlared.net]] An English translation of Jaime Semprun’s book, The Abyss Repopulates Itself, may be found online at: [[https://libcom.org/library/abyss-repopulates-itself-jaime-semprun

Miguel Amorós

The Period of Decline

“Whoever looks at the world rationally will find that it in turn assumes

a rational aspect; the two exist in a reciprocal relationship.”

Hegel, “Reason in History”

During an era like the sixties and seventies of the past century that

was open to every possibility for radical change, the greatest concern

of its supporters revolved around the forms of its total realization. In

many countries the time had come for revolutionary action and it was

necessary to overcome, with subversive actions, the contradictions that

were driving the old class society towards its doom. Here are some

typical titles that issued from Jaime Semprun’s pen during those years:

The Social War in Portugal; Manuscript Found in Vitoria; and

Considerations on the Current Situation in Poland. It was a time of

struggle, of the intelligent movement of the deployed social forces and

therefore of tactics and strategy. The movement passed from theory to

action; from the arms of critique to the critique of arms. The writings

that most accurately reflect that period are those whose purpose was

agitation and panoramic analysis, those that examined the developmental

trends of the moment and assessed their potential. The truth, which had

for so long been trapped in the carcass of the old world, fought towards

the light and displayed all its amplitude and splendor, objectively and

subjectively. It was implicitly accepted that the truth exists and that

it was revolutionary. Everything was rapidly simplified and clarified.

Opposites were dialectically reconciled, while the fragmentation and

individualism typical of a dying epoch yielded before the unification

and the universality of a period of iconoclasm. But what happened in the

eighties, when the forces unleashed by the social crisis were incapable

of overcoming the profound disarray occasioned by those unresolved

contradictions?

Either the revolutionary subject was not strong enough and was defeated,

or else it vacillated and retreated when faced with the immensity of its

tasks until it finally disappeared. There was no new dawn to welcome.

The revolution was no longer on the agenda. It was even accused of being

the bearer of totalitarianism, and therefore undesirable on that account

alone. The unifying impulse of the revolutionary cycle disappeared and

the terms of the contradiction became independent of each other. On the

one side, the economy, the State, civilization, the countryside, the

ruling class; on the other, society, the individual, nature, the

metropolis, the ruled masses. The connections between them were severed.

Subjectivity and objectivity, being and nothingness, body and soul,

means and ends, affirmation and negation, were abruptly separated. It

was the end of the happy totality of revolt and of the collective

harmony of its protagonists. Recuperation, working on behalf of the

memory industry, made the commodification of its fragments possible.

This had repercussions in philosophy, art, culture, social critique,

literature and politics, giving rise to an endless succession of

substitutes for these domains. The Handbook of Recuperation [Précis de

récupération] is a text whose purpose was to fight against this

tendency. Utopias, ideals, and, finally, the very solidity of the modern

world all came to an end. Mass individualism and a fully-furnished

imprisonment in private life emerged victorious. Freedom became the

freedom to consume and submission to the imperatives of consumption

became habitual, repeated on a daily basis. The project of a universal

community gave way to a juxtaposition of dehumanized atoms. Popular

culture was drastically reduced to a purely utilitarian dimension.

Language was impoverished and populated with technological and

post-structuralist neologisms. Reality then became unintelligible and

was enveloped in a fog of representations, all of which were incomplete

and arbitrary, and therefore chimerical and false. The phantasmagoria

that subsequently replaced reality have since then done nothing but

cloud people’s minds and render real life alien to human beings, since

they cannot understand its rationality, because their gaze does not

penetrate the surface of things, it goes no further than the contingent

and remains fixed on external appearances, on the spectacle.

The transformation of the world in accordance with libertarian patterns

was finally aborted in the eighties, forcing revolutionaries to retreat

within themselves, a fate which only the most eminent figures of the

movement tried to avoid by way of critical reflection. The owl of

Minerva takes wing at dusk. Theoretical elaboration was therefore born

from the recognition of failure, the failure of the social revolution, a

failure which could not, however, be considered to be final. The

prospect for revolutionary change was undermined, but the victory of

domination resolved none of the essential contradictions; instead, it

exacerbated them. Crises were therefore inevitable. The anti-nuclear

movement, the youth of Tienanmen Square, the people of Soweto, the

“Solidarnosc” of the Polish workers and the fall of the Berlin Wall, for

example, were signs of a healthy future. Critical thought only attempted

to build bridges between the revolts of the past and those of the

future. Its task was fleeting: it tried to elaborate an up-to-date

expression of the universal condemnation of the current state of affairs

in order to escape from a labyrinth whose twists and turns were becoming

far too prolonged. Theory was the tool with which these critics not only

tried to explain the epoch for the purpose of surviving the moral

poverty and the vapidity that characterized it, but with which they also

aspired to once again reunite the latent forces of negation, the ones

that stoked the fires of their cause with the fuel of dissatisfaction.

This was the purpose, for example, of books like The Nuclearization of

the World and the journal, Encyclopédie des Nuisances. Thus, theory by

no means meant passivity or withdrawal: the door was always open to

action regardless of its scale. Theory and practice were not opposed but

were intended to be united in a reconstructed totality, but this unity

was not attained, and to this very day it is far from being realized. It

was not that those who made this attempt were on the wrong track, but

rather that they yielded to optimism, put too much faith in the

dissolving power of the truth and overestimated the negativity of the

conflicts they witnessed: on the one hand, truth was relativized and

ceased to have any effect on a world ruled by falsehood; on the other

hand, negation was incapable of giving rise to a creative passion. The

crisis also affected the workers movement and its ideals of

emancipation. Capitalist society survived and was capable of effectively

defending itself from the impact of scandals and revolutions by

rendering a part of the working population, the main productive force,

superfluous, thanks to new technologies. It was not that more and more

workers were refusing to enter the labor market; rather, the labor

market was rejecting more and more workers. The pressure of unemployment

and the fear of exclusion inflicted as much harm as consumerist

propaganda, which is why neither a universal consciousness nor, much

less, a popular will, could take shape, or, to put it another way, the

revolutionary subject, the forces of negation and affirmation, and the

new combatant community of individuals who desired to freely organize

their lives, were incapable of forming. The rules of the commodity and

the ideology of progress still determined social relations both in

everyday life, which was becoming increasingly more colonized, as well

as in public life, which was becoming increasingly more

professionalized. By way of the globalization of capitalism and the

expansion of the new communications technologies, the spectacle

penetrated so deeply into the social imaginary that it ended up

completely replacing reality. As a result, irrationality contaminates

all reasoning. And without rational thought, there is no real subject.

The human being can only achieve self-realization in a free society, but

in contemporary society freedom is offered exclusively as spectacle, the

no-where of the fictitious resolution of social contradictions. And as

the spectacle of politics, social life, culture and revolution, too, if

the opportunity arises. And as the spectacle of self-realization, which

is becoming less and less credible, insofar as the degree of frustration

is now too high to be controlled with simulacra. In the interests of

resolving the latter problem, “leftist” pseudo-happenings are quite

effectively utilized by the system. Leftist ideologies are to the

spectacle what critical thought is to revolt. They comprise the first

step to spectacular submission. They perform the consolatory function

that was in other times entrusted first to the Church and then to

consumption: to make personal misery and the sensation of defeat

bearable. Contemporary leftism is trying to indoctrinate various

uprooted sectors, mainly the youth, to mobilize them in the name of

abstractions, such as, for example, the working class, the people or the

citizenry. It is not doing this in order to bring about a free society,

without either Market or State, but to refurbish the neoliberal economy

in such a way as to improve the deteriorated social status of these

sectors. They call this the “transition to post-capitalism”. Despite the

destruction of the working class milieu, the proliferation of civil

servants and white collar employees, and the automation of industry, a

vanguard minority still assigned a redemptive role to the industrial

proletariat. Its analyses hardly took any account of the disintegration

of class identity [declasamiento] and alienation, tendencies that are

easily verified in the generalization among wage earners of a mentality

that is identical to that of the middle class. In a world without

meaning, the more absurd a theory is, the greater its impact. Most

leftists, however, have in fact adapted their strategies to the

stabilizing presence of this mass of philistine wage earners, which they

call the “citizenry”. The “citizenry” arose as the imaginary subject of

modern political change, occupying on the institutional terrain the

central position that the working class left vacant when it lost its

identity and its being. It affirms its existence by the act of voting,

not by thinking and acting. The guiding principle of its existence is

the right to vote, not the right to revolt. As a new universal class,

its existence is not based on the scandal of inequality, alienation and

oppression; it is instead founded on its capabilities with respect to

elections and State power. It acts more like a lobby than like a class.

It engages with reality by way of votes rather than demonstrations.

It is not customary to grant much importance to the key novelty of

postmodern industrial civilization, i.e., the expulsion to the margins

of society, without adequate material means, of an enormous number of

people abandoned to psychological decline and misery. Right now, more

than a billion poor people live in the peripheral slums of the major

cities of the world. At this time, only the direct victims of the

economy—peasants expelled from their land, people excluded from the

labor market, temporary and part time workers, the unemployed and the

marginalized, debtors and the desperate, the undocumented and the

homeless, refugees and displaced people, etc.—display any tendency to

react violently against their inhuman material and spiritual situation,

but they are in no condition to invent free activities that would lead

them towards the revolutionary abolition of their situation. The ruling

class is fully aware of this, for, although it is not at all afraid in

the least of any prospect of this sub-proletariat being converted

someday into the “reserve army” of a non-existent revolution that almost

no one wants, it nonetheless makes use of its violence to legitimize the

transformation from the “welfare” State to a penal “State”, thanks to

longer sentencing guidelines, restrictive legislation and a police force

with extensive powers and a high degree of impunity. It is definitely

the case that the most profoundly harmed layers of the population have

ceased to perform any function at all in the salvationist ideologies of

postmodernism. The idea of conceding some kind of “basic income” to

these layers of society, or of enlisting them in “cooperative” projects

subsidized by the State for the purpose of reintegrating them into the

world of consumption, is of neo-liberal inspiration. Leftists have for a

long time now devoted all their attention to the new middle classes

threatened by pauperization, classes whose conduct is more predictable

and politically more profitable. The civil society movement represents

the ideology of the end of the proletarian class as the doctrinal

reference point. But what next for those who have been uprooted by

globalization, the inhabitants of zones abandoned by the economy,

strangers in a hostile, decomposing world, with neither hope nor future?

The result of the general process of deracination, a phenomenon that

takes place in parallel with total proletarianization, is a disoriented,

ignorant person, with neither norms nor values, indifferent to knowledge

and understanding, frustrated and resentful, the enemy of everything and

everybody. We are no longer dealing with a war of class against class,

but a kind of war of all against all. At first glance this might not be

so evident, but judging by the frenzy and hysteria that lie just beneath

the surface of everyday reality, individuals seem like machines that are

on the verge of exploding. Only fear holds them back, but not entirely.

Class values—respect, loyalty, compassion, generosity, and above all,

solidarity—are no longer practiced, so that riots of desperation have

replaced general strikes, but without any cumulative effect at all. On

the outskirts of the major cities, uprisings have continued to take

place since 1981, the year of the Brixton Riots (and ever since August

of 1965, if we include the race riots of Watts). The disturbances in the

slum areas of the cities are purely destructive, given over to

vandalism; they make no demands nor are they coordinated, they

disseminate no slogans nor do they have spokespersons, they are

depoliticized, disorganized, without objectives. A spark of indignation

sets them on fire and exhaustion or boredom puts them out. Such revolts

lack consciousness, but possess more than enough motivation, which the

State can make use of and even provoke if it needs a justification to

augment its authoritarian machinery. Jaime was the first person to speak

of this very real possibility of such a staged provocation in The Abyss

Repopulates Itself. There would be no shortage of people who would view

these movements—from afar, of course—as the return of the real

proletariat, and there would even be people who would consider their

monstrous defects in a positive light, but this is due to the

fascination exercised by nothingness, re-christened as the permanent

desire for insurrection, among the intellectualized urban youth,

insubordinate but incapable of real rebellion. These new ideologues are

not at all disturbed by ignorance and irrationality, they praise egoism,

they make a clean slate of culture, they are ignorant of history and

estheticize violence, the typical features not only of the uprooted

individual of the slums, but also of the postmodern, solipsistic,

normally integrated individual. They glorify confrontation with the

forces of order and arson as the highest state of revolt. Of course, it

is not exactly revolt, but the spectacle of chaos, total

“deconstruction”. Reading such diatribes, one gets the impression that

they are trying to obscure the crisis instead of explain it.

Sophisticated and apocalyptic rhetoric, often seasoned with

off-the-shelf timeless truths, selected quotations and historical

allusions in the style of the “Invisible Committee”, do not change the

obscure nature of their alarmist visions. By abolishing, with various

degrees of skill, the past, memory, objective truth and thought itself,

they abolish contradiction, the tension between antagonistic positions,

the content of real life and the meaning of the struggle. Everything

takes place in the framework of a rigid linear perspective that tries to

give meaning to the proliferation of disconnected, and artificially

unleashed, acts of violence. Nothingness, like death, is liberating in

its own way. If truth does not exist, reality does not exist, either:

all speculations are permitted, and the more catastrophist, the better.

As Nietzsche said: “it is precisely facts that do not exist, only

interpretations.” This kind of reasoning is so perfectly suited to

domination that it is entirely legitimate to ask whether it was not

actually the product of domination. The discourse of power, which has

its own lexicon, is not essentially different. Therefore, the discourse

of revolt must not put all its eggs in the basket of absolute

negativity; this is a lesson learned from the past. The happy days of

the revolution will never return unless a considerable mass of the

population decides to live in a different way and situates itself

negatively and positively—and therefore dialectically—outside of the

status quo. Is this what is happening, however?

Capitalism, in the late stage of globalization, has abolished all

communitarian bonds, autonomous cultures, sociability, collective

practices, group identities, etc., stripping individuals of any direct

and profound relation with their kind and their environment, and instead

setting them at odds. Postmodern man, privileged or marginalized, is a

psychological pauper, an unfeeling narcissist with an absolute lack of

empathy; when you strip away the appearances and his function is

terminated, when face to face with himself he really has nothing but

loneliness and emptiness. The most widely-verified social experience in

the technological world colonized by the commodity is that of absence

and nothingness. This is what alienation is like during the period of

decline. Most people try to escape, whether by demanding more security

in order to plunge even deeper into a wretched private life, largely

virtual and based on a flashy and affected pseudo-individualism

[friki—derived from the English word, “freak”], or else by resorting to

carefully constructed, and therefore fictitious, identities, seeking

refuge, as people did in the past, in ideologies or religions. The times

are favorable for both militant escapism and schizophrenia (the two were

already connected by Gabel), for both false consciousness as well as for

psychopathological reactions against a society that is viewed as a

foreign and hostile environment. The doors are equally open to both the

opportunity to enclose ourselves in an air-conditioned shell and the

opportunity to throw ourselves off a cliff. The WHO calculates that 3%

of the world’s population suffers from mental illness (Reich would call

it the emotional plague), that is, 160 million people. Surely the

percentage is higher, twice that or even more. Frustration has made such

inroads that a considerable number of people refuse to accommodate

themselves to a degrading and predictable life and throw themselves

head-first towards death, attacking the first people who cross their

paths, the unwilling cast of extras in their outbursts. Panic disorders,

anxiety and depression foster unconditional submission, cocooning and

the solitary suicide, but rage and resentment lead to psychosis,

criminal violence and fantasies of mass extermination. And these

pathologies are not exclusively restricted to one specific class or

sub-class: the attraction of the abyss is almost the only aspect of this

declining civilization that can be considered to be universal. The

frequent cases of armed young people from wealthy families who upload

their pathological ruminations on various social networking websites and

even record videos of the murders they perpetrate on their smart phones

minutes before committing suicide or being gunned down by the police,

constitute a good example of just how far the revenge fantasies and

existential anxieties of unbalanced nihilists can go when they depart

from their bubbles of privacy. This observation is quite banal, yet very

pertinent. Under the current psychopathological conditions, it is even

natural. The social fabric is being unraveled, modern times have reached

their consummation and the “abyss” is being repopulated, as Jaime

Semprun said, but with people from every class. Suicidal extremism is

presently associated with Islam, but we must not deceive ourselves, it

is not the Koran that inspires the jihadists of the European ghettoes,

but anomie, delusional thinking, the feeling of power and the fetishism

of weapons. These factors have been at play for quite some time now. The

same contempt for life and the same cult of death lie behind the conduct

of the co-pilot of Germanwings Flight 9525 and the Norwegian

ultra-rightist responsible for the massacre on the island of Utøya, the

perpetrators of the Columbine shootings (which have been imitated on

more than sixty occasions) and Latin American gangsters and hit-men.

The population under global capitalism has lost its way and does not

possess any clear guides for conduct by which it could orient itself:

the models provided by the middle class are proving to be less

satisfying in this regard with each passing day. The prevailing

conditions are psychopathological, albeit in a tolerable way for their

subjects: under the sway of the Narcissus complex, the enemy is always

other people. The lumpen volunteers of the Islamic State are thus not an

extreme case of a lethal fundamentalism that blames all the “infidels”

for the oppression of an alleged Moslem people (another abstraction),

but merely one more among so many other instances of this very secular

aberration of globalized capitalism: nihilism. Islam has nothing to do

with it; the Internet, however, does. Its role is far too important to

ignore and we can now refer to comprehensive studies of its impact—in

the works of Olivier Roy, for example. The crisis of culture is the

result of the complete elimination of subjectivity (of the Freudian

ego), values, direct communication and the inner life (referred to by

Derrida as “metaphysics”), the consequence of the absolute rule of the

economy and of the unilateral appropriation of scientific and technical

knowledge by its executives. Paradoxically, the progressivism of the

leaders of this society and the scientism of its experts have plunged

humanity into the pit of irrationalism, an achievement that is

celebrated as a philosophical victory by all postmodern thinkers. But

the irrational is not real, instrumental knowledge is not culture and

science is not the only way to apprehend reality. Moreover, material

progress ultimately entails profound ethical regression.

Techno-scientific objectivism and economic rationality do not lead to a

human way of life, but only to mechanized survival. When knowledge has

been displaced from real life, that is, from culture properly

speaking—when the universal human being has been liquidated and replaced

by the isolated, robotic and intersectionalized individual—then nothing

has any value and nothing matters. Nihilism permeates the inhuman

lifestyle of these new times. Others will point to irrationality or

barbarism. We are not only immersed in a global social crisis, but in a

crisis of civilization, both in its Western and Eastern forms. There is

no clash between cultures, there is a generalized dissolution of all of

them. At the culminating point of globalization, so many alterations

have taken place in everyday life, and so much disorder has been

fostered in people’s minds, that the regulatory and moderating ethics of

social behavior have disappeared everywhere, from North to South and

from East to West, transforming global society into a planetary factory

producing mentally ill individuals, many of whom are out of control and

in positions of power. We should recall with respect to this last

observation that, since the rise to power of the military in Argentina

and Chile and the eruption of drug trafficking on a vast scale, torture,

assassination and disappearance have become routine forms of governance.

Capitalist globalization is its own worst enemy. It fears neither

conflicts nor crises, which are always inevitable insofar as their

causes are constantly proliferating, but only the uncontrollable

character of the evil that it has itself fostered (including wars),

because it provokes divisions within its own ranks and undermines its

own foundations; this is why its propaganda features so much

catastrophism. Disaster management is based on the search for arguments

with which the bad outcomes of its own operations can be explained and

its disastrous decisions can be justified. And wherever you look, by

cloaking a portion of the prevailing nihilism under the Islamic veil,

the latter provides the ideal pretext for the creation of a global

security State, the instrument with which this absurd world’s leaders

will attempt to prevent its collapse, even at the price of literally

sacrificing a large number of their subjects. The security services are

now in the front ranks of the columns of demonstrators protesting

against terrorism. Generalized social control and the domestic

application of wartime laws regarding enemy combatants are so much more

easily justified by the proliferation of spontaneous and solitary

jihadists—“terrorists”—than by the alarmist propaganda concerning social

decomposition, based until recently on crime, drug trafficking, illegal

immigration and the activities of anti-system idealists. “Enemies” are

fundamental for the stability of a globalized society that is so easily

susceptible to unforeseeable catastrophes. We must repeat, however, that

the real enemies of humanity, the nihilists of an irresponsible and

demented elite, now occupy the most crucial positions of power.

Unfortunately, the insurrection still lies in the distant future;

anti-capitalist skirmishes are too weak, and too restricted to small

minorities, they possess scant resources and are largely rejected by a

population that is for the most part conformist and frightened.

Furthermore, they are burdened by the dead weight of civil society

reformism and illusory convivial formulas such as “responsible” consumer

networks, “time” banks and “social” currencies. Just as we must be

unyielding with respect to the prevailing chaos, we must also be cruel

towards these excessively optimistic assessments, which respond to

nothing but self-deception, activist bluff and the demagogy of an

improvised civil society leadership. Most of the people who get involved

in such projects feel a sense of panic in the face of the evils towards

which the collapse of the social structure is dragging them, or towards

the repression that might be unleashed by actions that are too radical,

which is why they prefer to close their eyes to the obvious: the fact

that no significant territory can function outside of capitalist norms

and compete with the “system” without the latter noticing it.

Nonetheless, despite all the partial victories that the system can claim

to its credit, and no matter how much dread the prospect of its downfall

inspires in the mass of citizens, capitalism harbors colossal

contradictions that irremediably condemn it to death. The frantic race

of economic growth has irreversibly dislocated society, globalized

corruption, unleashed wars and given rise to dictatorships, and will

undoubtedly end up ravaging the planet.

The revolutionaries of the sixties and seventies underestimated the

capacity for survival of the capitalist regime, but they were not

mistaken in their diagnosis. The fact that the critical minorities of

that era were incapable of transmitting their views to a broader public,

does not obviate the circumstance that the degree of dissatisfaction is

increasing and that lucid protest can reappear and spread if an idea of

another way of life—a crystallization of historical consciousness—can

take root in a large enough part of the population where those who have

been left behind are well-represented. Shortages and hunger can

contribute to this development, but they are not the determining

factors. Naturally, survival is the highest priority, but the

impossibility of satisfying even the most minimal moral necessities that

inform the community spirit is the principal element of revolt. This was

true of the proletarian revolutions of the past and this is what can

once again characterize the struggles in defense of territory, the only

struggles that are currently replete with vital content and a capacity

for idealism. The reconstruction of community bonds and the return of

reason is still on the horizon of possibilities, but without any

guarantees, since sufficient means of self-defense are lacking.

Resignation is presently predominant, and careerists, predators and the

mentally ill are numerous, but there cannot be the slightest doubt that

the statist-market society is destined for the scrap yard. This is the

only prediction that can really be made without any risk of being

disproven. Of course, this does not imply the automatic triumph of the

libertarian cause, for it might in fact signify the contrary—the State

might emerge victorious, or nihilist barbarism might prevail—but we

cannot entirely rule out the victory of freedom. There is still a lot of

thread on the spool. History never stops and a period of darkness can be

followed by an era of light.