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Title: Indisputable Proof Author: Miguel Amorós Date: 2013 Language: en Topics: Capitalism, crisis, repression, Spain Source: Retrieved on 9th May 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/indisputable-proof-miquel-amor%C3%B3s Notes: Notes for presentations scheduled to be delivered on January 2, 2014 at the Ateneu de L’Estació, Albaida (Valencia), and on January 11, 2014, at the Cau dels Llops, Villalonga, organized by the Assembly for the Defense of the Territory of La Safor (Valencia). Translated in January 2014 from a copy of the Spanish text provided by the author.
Living in a perpetual present means precisely to exclude the experience
of time and to be spared the reasoned and implacable critique of
reality. The main beneficiaries of this situation are leaders,
ideologues and bureaucrats, since their responsibility in the defeat and
disappearance of the workers movement is thus exonerated. New sorcerers’
apprentices, manipulators and deluded elements can come to fill the
vacant spaces on the stage, fully confident that all memory of their
careerism, cowardice, irrationality and betrayals will be erased with
the passage of time. Meanwhile, except for a handful of exceptions, even
today’s rebels are looking neither backward nor forward. They have
instead installed themselves in a timeless and therefore static limbo,
whence they contemplate events with a mixture of astonishment and
fatalism, reacting to them in a emotional and voluntarist way. In the
absence of any rational reflection pursued right out in the open, it
seems that mysteries have come to an end without being revealed, that
situations conclude without being clarified and contradictions cease to
exist without being superseded. Hyper-negative logorrhea and the
repetition of doctrinaire recipes or the jargon of fashionable
confusionism have replaced critical thought. Their feet are no longer on
the ground; revolt revolves around itself and consumes itself from
within, incapable of understanding the moment and affecting it.
Even the most obtuse of our contemporaries should not find it too hard
to try to recall what things were like forty or fifty years ago and to
take note of the great social changes that took place then, which were
the cause of this mudslide that has buried even the most non-conformist
minds of our time. For it was the technological innovations introduced
in the process of production and the massive development of the tertiary
sector, that displaced the industrial proletariat from the center of a
working class in which white collar employees and civil servants were
then on the verge of comprising the majority of the class. The
consequence for the class struggle was fundamental, since the imposition
of work rules typical of those applied to industrial workers on the
employees of the state institutions and the service sector proved to be
of no use: even if all external authority were to be removed from
administrative and commercial labor (more precisely, even if such jobs
were to be self-managed), these sectors could not be transformed into
the cornerstone of a society of free producers. Social conflicts no
longer contained the seed of a confrontation based on principles, nor
could strikes seriously entertain the proposal of expropriation and
autonomous management. The civil service and white collar employees
trade unions, hegemonic in the wage earning class, were not capable of
functioning as parts of a stateless socialist regime, nor could any
meaningful collectivization project be undertaken from the basis of
their logistical platforms, lecture halls, bureaus or offices.
At the same time, the masses of wage earners, who had ceased to be the
main productive force thanks to technology, went on to become the main
consuming force, to the detriment of the bourgeoisie. The modalities of
alienation and oppression that accompanied this economic reshuffling
were necessarily unlike those of the past, and were more connected to
consumption than to survival. Capital no longer pursued the mere
reproduction of necessary labor power, but the extended reproduction of
the capacity for consumption of labor power. The everyday life of the
workers began to be moulded in this direction. Developmentalism, that
is, the idea that economic growth will solve any social or political
problem by way of consumption, became the credo of the rulers of the
incipient society of the spectacle. At that time the social-liberal
illusion of an irresistible march towards the enjoyment of all possible
commodities was imposed, a process that was supposed to be precipitated
and harmonized by full employment and a centralized and benevolent state
power. The industrialization of life, however, then ran up against new
and more profound contradictions, as was demonstrated by the crisis of
the sixties and seventies of the past century. The critique of everyday
life and the spectacle (of which the critiques of sexism and industrial
food are a part) was the key theoretical factor, just as the critique of
wage labor and the critique of the state were the key theoretical
factors in the past, which is why the class struggle had to focus on the
rejection of commodified consumption and its corresponding politics,
rather than on jobs and wages. The refusal to consume was an invitation
to self-segregation and self-constitution as a collectivity outside of
capitalism. The classical forms of workers resistance, the trade unions
and assemblies, were revealed to be inoperative because they had not
successfully fulfilled their function by remaining on the terrain of
labor, and therefore on that of capital. The social war would resume on
other fields. If the mechanisms of workers struggle are inscribed in the
labor market and not in everyday life, they will be incapable of
becoming instruments of freedom and re-appropriation. The other forms of
struggle that were advocated, the communes, erred in the opposite
direction, that is, in that they embraced a voluntary ignorance of the
revolutionary experience of the working class and indifference towards
the practical questions of social combat, which, combined with a
precarious experimentation and a pseudo-mystical ideology expressed in
the esoteric language of self-help and Zen, led to an even more
resounding failure.
Capitalism had to try to overcome the crisis by globalizing it, thanks
to a long period of general restructuring during which the exploitation
of the territory ended up being the axis of a financialized economy.
Extensive urbanization, with the subsequent accelerated circulation of
credit, commodities and consumers, made the territory the depository of
the new globalized misery. As a result, the defense of the territory and
anti-developmentalism must engage in theoretical-practical work
beginning with the critique of everyday life, and also by advocating
direct democracy at all levels, the public dimension of unifying action,
indissolubly associated with the collective experience of a life that
aspires to set down roots, to liberate itself from constraints and to
fill itself with content. The foreseeable prospect of future crises,
which will be even more profound than the previous ones, merits much
more assiduous analysis. In connection with this question, we shall
merely point out that the forced flight forward of the capitalist system
will make it more vulnerable despite all appearances, since each
dysfunction with regard to energy supplies, consumption or indebtedness,
for example, could have unexpected repercussions, and this causes the
most trivial components of the circulation process to become critical
factors. The support of civil society was never fully guaranteed; for by
submerging every activity, including politics, within the private
sphere, and thereby eliminating the domain of the public sphere, private
interests can no longer be identified with sufficient conviction with
institutional interests. The prevailing legality, not inspiring any
respect, must instill fear and in order to do so it must endow itself
with a greater capacity for repression.
Under the cover of laws against “terrorism”, drug trafficking and
organized crime, the figures of the “suspect” and the “enemy” were
introduced, which in practice extended the suspicion of “criminality” to
any expression of dissidence or sympathy with dissidence, thus causing
the entire population to be subjected to surveillance and espionage. The
old dictatorial concept of “public order” was camouflaged behind those
of “public safety” and “State security”, which transformed any action or
opinion that is opposed to the economy or the prevailing political power
into the crime of terrorism, or inciting or apologizing for terrorism,
and therefore into a crime subject to severe punishment, regardless of
how peaceful such an action or opinion may be. The rights of the public
degenerated into the private right of the state, giving way to major
regressive changes in the juridical order, especially with regard to
penal law. The legally sanctioned punitive power of the authorities
shattered the barriers posed by the need for proof of guilt, uniform
sentencing and the proportionality of the punishment that limited it, so
that it can now be exercised simply in the form of “preventive measures”
within an emergency situation that has become standard operating
procedure. From now on, any reform of the Penal Code or any other
proposed reform, like the one approved last September 26, will entail
nothing but the legalization of the abuses which have in general defined
the whole career of the Spanish particratic regime. This regressive
penal legislation, however, did not apply to those behaviors,
infractions or misdeeds “that are not construable as crimes” because
they fall within the framework of formal democratic guarantees, so it
must be complemented by administrative measures aimed at restricting the
rights of assembly, expression and demonstrations. This is the function
of the new reform of the law of Civil Security, the “kick in the teeth”
initiative. The law not only grants full impunity to police violence for
the purpose of controlling, inhibiting and disrupting all
anti-governmental protests without any legal impediments, but also opens
the door to the privatization of its enforcement, further extending the
powers of private security agencies.
The prevailing institutional order, born from a reform that was agreed
to by the Franco Dictatorship, is authoritarian and intolerant, like its
predecessor, however much it calls itself democratic, and tends to
become more so as it encounters difficulties. The state feels insecure,
it fears that civil society will reorganize outside of its framework and
defy it. This is why it must perceive any demonstration of
non-conformity or any public exposure of its arbitrary conduct—any
“unauthorized” recording or undesired dissemination of information, for
example—and ultimately any informal outdoor gatherings, sit-ins,
demonstrations, occupations, or even vocal expressions of disapproval,
as a lack of respect for its representatives and an unendurable
transgression of the legal order that is worthy of the most onerous
fines (if other means are lacking); an extremely clear case of “public
disorder” against which demonstrations of indiscriminate force are in
order. When the state of the ruling class finds itself in an unfavorable
situation, whether because of the unpopularity of its personnel, or due
to the harmful effects of the economy, it must drastically reduce the
scope of civil rights and expand its capacity for taking action against
the disobedient, thus entering into conflict with the constitutional
norms that legitimate its order. Power can never be defied, nor can its
measures be challenged. As a result, the “reason of order” of the
particratic state is becoming more and more like the violent “reason of
state” of the fascist states, so that the exercise of nominal liberties
has become practically illegal, such as was the case, not to go too far
back in time, in the Dictatorship of our past. This is how domination
operates when the lower orders are not intimidated, and as a result
those who would contest its rule must either dodge its blows, or else
outflank it.