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Title: Ten Blows Against Politics Author: Il Pugnale Date: Fall/Winter 2006 Language: en Topics: green anarchy, Green Anarchy #21, politics, anti-politics, recuperation, repression, mediation, representation Source: Retrieved on 31 August 2018 from http://greenanarchy.anarchyplanet.org/files/2012/05/greenanarchy21.pdf Notes: from Green Anarchy #21, Fall/Winter 2006
So that human activity is not freed from the fetters of obligation and
work revealing itself in all its potential. So that workers do not
encounter each other as individuals and put an end to being exploited.
So that students do not decide to destroy the schools in order to choose
how when and what to learn. So that intimate friends and relatives do
not fall in love and leave off being little servants of a little state.
So that children are nothing more than imperfect copies of adults. So
that the distinction between good (anarchists) and bad (anarchists) is
not gotten rid of. So that individuals are not the ones that have
relationships, but commodities. So that no one disobeys authority. So
that if anyone attacks the structures of exploitation of the state,
someone hurries to say, “It was not the work of comrades.” So that banks
courts, barracks don’t blow up. In short, so that life does not manifest
itself.
The most effective way to discourage all rebellion, all desire for real
change, is to present a man or woman of state as subversive, or – better
yet – to transform a subversive into a man or woman of state. Not all
people of state are paid by the government. There are functionaries who
are not found in parliament or even in the neighboring rooms. Rather,
they frequent the social centers and sufficiently know the principle
revolutionary theories. They debate over the liberatory potential of
technology; they theorize about non-state public spheres and the
surpassing of the subject. Reality – they know it well – is always more
complex than any action. So if they hope for a total theory, it is only
in order to totally neglect it in daily life. Power needs them because –
as they themselves explain to us – when no one criticizes it, power is
criticized by itself.
Of anyone who does not separate the moments of her/his life and who
wants to change given conditions starting from the totality of their
desires. Of anyone who wants to set fire to passivity, contemplation and
delegation. Of anyone who does not want to let themselves be supplanted
by any organization or immobilized by any program. Of anyone who wants
to have direct relationships between individuals and make difference the
very space of equality. Of anyone who does not have any we on which to
swear. Of anyone who disturbs the order of waiting because s/he wants to
rise up immediately, not tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. Of anyone
who gives her/ himself without compensation and forgets her/himself in
excess. Of any one who defends her comrades with love and resoluteness.
Of anyone who offers recuperators only one possibility: that of
disappearing. Of anyone who refuses to take a place in the numerous
groups of rogues and of the anaesthetized. Of anyone who neither wants
to govern nor to control. Of anyone who wants to transform the future
into a fascinating adventure.
Where life has lost its fullness, where the thoughts and actions of
individuals have been dissected, catalogued and enclosed in detached
spheres – there politics begins. Having distanced some of the activities
of individuals (discussion, conflict, common decision, agreement) into a
zone by itself that claims to govern everything else, sure of its
independence, politics is at the same time separation between the
separations and the hierarchical management of separateness. Thus, it
reveals itself as specialization, forced to transform the unresolved
problem of its function into the necessary presupposition for resolving
all problems. For this reason, the role of professionals in politics is
indisputable – and all that can be done is to replace them from time to
time. Every time subversives accept separating the various moments of
life and changing specific conditions starting from that separation,
they become the best allies of the world order. In fact, while it
aspires to be a sort of precondition of life itself, politics blows its
deadly breath everywhere.
In order to govern the mutilations inflicted on life, it constrains
individuals to passivity, to the contemplation of the spectacle prepared
upon the impossibility of their acting, upon the irresponsible
delegation of their decisions. Then, while the abdication of the will to
determine oneself transforms individuals into appendages of the state
machine, politics recomposes the totality of the fragments in a false
unity. Power and ideology thus celebrate their deadly wedding. If
representation is that which takes the capacity to act away from
individuals, replacing it with the illusion of being participants rather
than spectators, this dimension of the political always reappears
wherever any organization supplants individuals and any program keeps
them in passivity. It always reappears wherever an ideology unites what
is separated in life.
Between the so-called totality and individuals and between individual
and individual. Just as the divine will has need of its earthly
interpreters, so the collectivity has need of its delegates. Just as in
religion, there are no relationships between humans but only between
believers, so in politics it is not individuals who come together, but
citizens. The links of membership impede union because separation
disappears only in union. Politics renders us all equal because there
are no differences in slavery – equality before god, equality before the
law. This is why politics replaces real dialogue, which refuses
mediation, with its ideology. Racism is the sense of belonging that
prevents direct relationships between individuals. All politics is
participatory simulation. All politics is racist. Only by demolishing
its barriers in revolt could everyone meet each other in their
individuality. I revolt, therefore, we are. But if we are, farewell
revolt.
Every action is like the instant of a spark that escapes the order of
generality. Politics is the administration of that order. “What sort of
action do you want in the face of the complexity of the world?” This is
what those who have been benumbed by the dual somnolence of a Yes that
is no and a More later that is never. Bureaucracy, the faithful
maidservant of politics, is the nothing administered so that no one can
act, so that no one recognizes their responsibility in the generalized
irresponsibility. Power no longer says that every thing is under
control, it says the opposite: “If I don’t ever manage to find the
remedies for it, let’s imagine it as something else.” Democratic
politics is now based on the catastrophic ideology of the emergency
(“either us or fascism, either us or terrorism, either us or the
unknown”). Even when oppositional, generality is always an event that
never happens and that cancels all those that happen. Politics invites
everyone to participate in the spectacle of this motionless movement.
Its time is the future, which is why it imprisons everyone in a
miserable present. All together, but tomorrow. Anyone who says “I and
now” ruins the order of waiting with the impatience that is the
exuberance of desire. Waiting for an objective that escapes from the
curse of the particular. Waiting for an adequate quantitative growth.
Waiting for measurable results. Waiting for death. Politics is the
constant attempt to transform adventure into future. But only if I
resolve “I and now” could there ever be an us that is not the space of a
mutual renunciation, the lie that renders each of us the controller of
the other. Anyone who wants to act immediately is always looked upon
with suspicion. If she is not a provocateur, it is said, she can
certainly be used as such. But it is the moment of an action and of a
joy without tomorrows that carries us to the morning after. Without the
eye fixed on the hand of the clock.
Always waiting for conditions to ripen, one ends up sooner or later
forming an alliance with the masters of waiting. At bottom, reason,
which is the organ of deferment, always provides some good reason for
coming to an agreement, for limiting damages, for salvaging some detail
from a whole that one despises. Politics has sharp eyes for discovering
alliances. It is not all the same, they tell us. The Reformed Communist
party is certainly not like the rampant and dangerous right. (We don’t
vote for it in elections – we are abstentionists, ourselves – but the
citizens’ committees, the initiatives in the plazas are another thing).
Public health is always better than private assistance. A guaranteed
minimum wage is still always preferable to unemployment. Politics is the
world of the lesser evil. And resigning oneself to the lesser evil,
little by little one accepts the totality in which only partialities are
granted. Anyone who contrarily wants to have nothing to do with this
lesser evil is an adventurer. Or an aristocrat.
In order to make alliances profitable, it is necessary to learn the
secrets of allies. Political calculation is the first secret. It is
necessary to know where to put one’s feet. It is necessary to draw up
detailed inventories of efforts and outcomes. And by dint of measuring
what one has, one ends up gaining everything except the will to lay it
on the line and lose it. So one is always taken up with oneself,
attentive and quick to demand the count. With the eye fixed on that
which surrounds one, one never forgets oneself. Vigilant as military
police. When love of oneself becomes excessive it demands to give
itself. And this overabundance of life makes us forget ourselves. In the
tension of the rush, it makes us lose count. But the forgetfulness of
ourselves is the desire for a world in which it is worth the effort of
losing oneself, a world that merits our forgetfulness. And this is why
the world as it is, administered by jailers and accountants, is
destroyed – to make space for the spending of ourselves. Insurrection
begins here. Overcoming calculation, but not through lack, as the
humanitarianism that, perfectly still and silent, allies itself with the
executioner, recommends, but rather through excess. Here politics ends.