💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › burn-shit-the-state-of-revolution.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 08:07:23. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: The State of Revolution
Author: Burn Shit
Date: November 26, 2011
Language: en
Topics: revolution, 2011
Source: Retrieved on 1st June 2021 from https://kpbsfs.wordpress.com/2011/11/26/the-state-of-the-world-and-the-state-of-revolt/

Burn Shit

The State of Revolution

It seems the whole world is teetering on the edge of a wonderful

oblivion. Stable authoritarian regimes have been toppled by their

restive subjects, a tyrant beaten and dragged through the streets by a

band of armed insurgents. Egyptians are now back on the streets and in

the squares, reinvigorating what seemed like a revolution betrayed by

hangers-on from the ancien regime. Across the world, resistance against

austerity drives and finance capital is mounting, and in England a

police shooting led to three nights of sustained rioting, looting and

arson that spread across the country via Blackberry. European capital’s

wet-dream of a single-currency trading bloc is on its deathbed as Greeks

defend themselves against EU-IMF gangsters with strikes, occupations and

molotovs. Italy and Spain will soon follow suit.

Today there is no unified struggle against systems of oppression because

there is no unified system of oppression. Never has this been more

evident than now. Rather than conceiving of the world in terms of an

oppressing ‘top’ and an oppressed ‘bottom’, what we have is a whole

series of scattered and interconnected power relations that transcend

narrow ideological boundaries. Similarly, resistance is both diffused

and connected. There is a burgeoning multitudinous opposition that takes

a variety of forms. The days of the counter-hegemonic opposition; party,

union, leadership and vanguard are over, as they have been subsumed into

a growing collage of movements; extra-parliamentary, de-centralised,

autonomous and heterogenous. Opposition and revolt is now a

constellation of spontaneous, uncontrollable eruptions that work outside

the old structures. There is no one movement constrained by a single

abstract ideological purism, unified identity, posturing leadership, or

the dogmas of a totalising universal system. The occupiers from New York

to Cairo, the banlieusards, the rioters in London and Damascus, the

squatters, Abahlali baseMhondolo, the MEND, the EZLN: With no common

identity, manifesto, flag, banner or over-arching representative body,

no mediator, rather a plurality of identities and (often antagonistic)

subjectivities, they form a matrix of agonistic forces united in their

refusal of the status quo – a multitude in constant flux.

It’s about time we dropped all the teleological ‘our day will come’

bullshit. Anarchism never quite divorced itself from Marxism. It’s still

hanging on to Enlightenment baggage and waiting for that one cataclysmic

event that’ll usher in a utopian epoch – the end of antagonisms, the end

of history. Many still see history as a history of class struggles that

will eventually culminate in a kind of Hegelian Grand Synthesis. We must

ditch the millenarianism and embrace revolution as a never-ending

process rather than an end. We have to stop waiting for Godot.

Anarchists have always been better at fusing means with ends, theory

with practice, but some still mourn the passing of the blue-collar

worker, the urban-industrial proletariat, the unionised producers on the

factory-line as the only true agents of social change. Some cling to a

syndicalist vision of ‘one big union’ and organising for The General

Strike like a life-buoy. It’s not that we should ‘abandon class’ or deny

the existence of class relations, but we should realise class as one

part of an aggregate of oppressive power relations, not flowing down a

neat line from bourgeois institutions to proletarian masses, but

emanating from a number of directions, reproducing itself through us as

subjects. We should stop defining ourselves in relation to the means of

production. This crude economism is of no use to us.

Bourgeois/Proletarian is not a clear-cut binary, it’s exalted status as

the primary oppression and the Source of all other oppressions masks a

far more deeply ingrained and disturbing network of power relations that

reproduce themselves through each individual as the products of power.

We do not deny the exploitation of employees by employers, nor the

uneven distribution of power and wealth, but we see these as elements of

multiple sequences of domination that go beyond the reductive categories

of ‘worker’ and ’employer’. In the panoptical society, we all have a cop

inside us. Power is not some external entity working against us, but

something which we internalise and reproduce.

2011 has seen various struggles escalate all over the world. The

insurrections and occupations are playing with new forms, affirming new

possibilities and realising their own powers and potentials. Infinite,

irreducible subjectivities, continually changing and becoming, negating

and affirming, destroying and creating without institution, without

unitary theory or binding abstract truth, acting

autonomously-within-solidarity.