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Title: The Xtended Release Manifesto Author: Xtended Release Date: 11/06/2018 Language: en Topics: riots, raves, revolution, music, dance music, party
“House isn't so much a sound as a situation”
-DJ Sprinkles, Midtown 120 Blues
What we would like to emphasize first and foremost is our absolute
adoration of mankind, a being who we hold to be fundamentally innocent,
responsible, amicable, and just. Free of all external factors, humanity
is a cooperative, social species. Our ability to get along, and our
capacity for love, is our greatest source of power. Throughout history,
we see that every injustice perpetrated, from the scale of spectacular,
catastrophic wars to every interpersonal act of ill will, to be the
result of external factors inhibiting our ability to cooperate, to
understand, and to love.
Such is the intensity of our love for humanity that we fail to even
articulate our dismay at what it has allowed to happen to humanity. But
what external factors could possibly account for what appears to be an
inherent wickedness of humankind? Simply put, the material conditions of
our lives, and the forces that control these conditions, and structures
that give power to those forces, are the roots of what we consider to be
the human experience. That is not to say that you are what you own, but
that the quality of your life is determined by what is available to you.
A society where any one person finds that healthcare is unavailable is a
failed society. A society where any individual finds that free
expression is not possible is a failed society. A society where anybody
finds that an expectation to live, and not be killed, enslaved, or
otherwise have their agency violated unrealistic is a failed society. We
base all these assumptions on the premise that all humans, by virtue of
how good they fundamentally, naturally are, deserve better than to
suffer as they do under the structures that currently exist.
Furthermore, we find that these structures are, at their most base
level, predicated on illegitimate hierarchies and fundamental
misunderstandings of the nature of human beings, nature, and reality.
Reformation of these structures accomplishes nothing. Power prefers
darkness, so they must be uprooted, held to the light, and expunged from
our collective reality. We are declaring war, on the grounds of self
defense, against all forms of illegitimate hierarchy. Our weapons will
manifest from our ability to love, to cooperate, and to understand one
another, our resolve from our inability to be anything but
unapologetically human. We hold true that the one thing capable of
freeing humanity from the inhumanity of the superstructure is our
unification against it. The best possible reality for any one of us is
one in which every single one of us is experiencing their best possible
reality.
The most fundamental principle of being a DJ is being attuned to the
reality of the dancefloor, and in turn the multitude of realities that
shape that reality. In other words, we have to pay attention to the
dancefloor, and consider what factors make the dancefloor the way that
it is. To internalize and reflect the situation presented to us, both
the situation that is immediately apparent to us and the general
situation that dictates the terms under which we construct our own
internal realities, that is each of our unique states of mind that
serves as a filter between what we understand to be real and the
unknowable real. To take an active role in the interplay between
content, context, situations, and the construction of reality is at the
core of the role of the DJ, music just happens to be the vehicle by
which we are able to participate.
But what is our situation? To put it bluntly, we are staring down the
barrel of oblivion and idly waiting for something to pull the trigger.
The forces of empire of capital are stronger now than ever before in the
history of humanity. Industry itself is on the verge of technological
breakthroughs that will irrevocably change the nature of production
forever. Wealth continues to flow upward where it is locked out of
access of the general population of the world. It might be too late to
do anything substantial to counteract human-made climate change. As a
harbinger to how critical our moment is and how bleak the future might
be, western democracies are bearing witness to a full-fledged resurgence
of fascism, an ideology created and solely made possible by the systemic
failure of capitalism.
We fear that the only thing left to fight for is the epilogue of the
human experience. We fear that we have run out of time to be anything
but absolutely radical in everything we do. To remain passive is to
assume defeat and accept complete annihilation. We have no intention of
doing so. It’s time to get going.
Within the rave and the riot exists a concurrent phenomenon in which
unarticulated angst manifests as the hysterical, kinetic body. This
angst stems from every aspect of our lives that are toxic to us that are
the result of capitalism, and the social power dynamics and exploitation
that results thereof. This angst is so toxic to us particularly because
we have no means to redress it, or even process it for that matter, due
to the fact that the only way to adequately process these feelings is to
accept that the reality we accept is illegitimate, the values we are
taught to hold true are forfeit, and that a reality that is a radical
departure from the one we take for granted is as possible as things
continuing on the same path forever (or at least as long as it can).
This capacity to envision alternate realities is the basis of radical
thought.
One of the many heads that constitutes the hydra that is our collective
angst is the knowledge that, under the structures of government,
elections, and constitutions we live under, we have no legitimate course
of action to enact any substantial political change. The powers that be
are smart enough to codify the means by which we as the general populace
are allowed to participate in the course of government so that they are
completely ineffectual to do what we need to be done. Only in moments
when the veneer of peace and order cracks do we see the natural process
by which inarticulate angst is converted into radical energy in a
hysteric, kinetic, populist explosion of fury and passion; the riot. In
the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,
“a riot is the language of the unheard.”
Riots, however, are but disparate example of groups of people
simultaneously reaching their breaking points in response to an extreme
stimuli and demonstrating their rage in a self-organized flash of
violence and disruption. In a way, they are a glass cannon. In our
situation, riots barely affect any substantial, lasting impact beyond
the physical destruction left behind and the implicit threat that it
might happen again. With the pace that mass media barrels along at
nowadays, even the memory of such events fades almost completely in the
span of weeks. The riot, for all its direct, tangible impact, fails to
allocate any of its energy into curating and maintaining a sustainable
movement, and they generally burn out as fast as they flare up.
The rave is another avenue for us to manifest this angst in the form of
the hysteric, kinetic body the similarity between how the rioter
gesticulates in the crowd in the streets and how the raver contorts
themself on the dancefloor are strikingly similar. In fact, it is not
uncommon to see rioters break into massive, spontaneous dances and chant
at the same regular intervals that dance music is structurally based on.
We don’t think this is a coincidence. Both the riot and the rave serve
the same function, to give people the opportunity to convert angst, an
unspoken rage, into radical energy. The difference between them is where
this energy is directed; in the case of the riot, an unsustainable
explosion of externalized violence. In the case of the rave, conjured
but failed to be utilized due to a lack of clear and explicit intent.
The rave’s capacity for radical organization is validated by the
fixation of empire’s forces on the recuperation of the rave phenomenon
by commodifying it in the form of major EDM festivals, where the energy
is completely obfuscated and perverted into absolute engrossment of the
spectacle.
Our intent is to utilize this limit-experience to organize and energize
a robust leftist presence in Los Angeles.
Destroyed.
“The House Nation likes to pretend clubs are an oasis from suffering,
but suffering is in here, with us” -DJ Sprinkles, Midtown 120 Blues
Understanding the reality of the dancefloor as a space where suffering
is not escaped from, but where it is actually confronted, is crucial to
understanding its role as a means for people to confront and internalize
feelings and experiences where conventional means fail us. This reality
also illuminates the importance the context of a rave is to the rave
itself. Raves do not exist merely due to an unaddressed demand for this
type of event, but specifically because they are illegal, underground,
unsanctioned, and radical, conditions that can only exist in opposition
to a status quo. In this sense, raves exist primarily as a reaction to
the status quo, and therefore it can be inferred that the function of
the rave is to subvert the status quo. Assuming the status quo relies on
the passivity of those that live under it, then the function of the rave
must be to engender radical energy in those that attend or participate.
The process by which the rave achieves this is by converting angst by
way of the hysterical body. The moment this conversion takes place is
akin to what Foucault called a limit-experience.
"The point of life which lies as close as possible to the impossibility
of living, which lies at the limit or the extreme.”
That is to say an experience that brings you to the far edge of
comprehension, a moment that allows you to perceive reality beyond the
false values that construct our general concept of reality. The moment
we embrace the absurd, a moment without which radical thought is
impossible.
The potential of this limit-experience can be laid to waste all too
easily by refusing to engage with the political reality of the situation
and ascribing completely to hedonism. To regard the dancefloor as a
space to escape, to forget, to chase euphoria. We’ve had enough fun.
It’s time to act.
We would be remiss to not explicitly acknowledge the revolutionary,
subversive cultural landscape we have decided engage with. That is to
say everything we might hope to accomplish is built on a foundation
established by Black, Latinx, and queer peoples, from the Harlem
ballrooms to the destitute auto factories of Detroit. Not just the
techno music that they are the progenitors for, but for imbuing it with
the political scope and intent that has always been an integral aspect
of the club. Even beyond whatever sort of debt we owe these progenitors,
the basis of our political thought is founded on the empowerment,
validation, and protection of all identifications of gender, race,
ethnicity, and class. However, in response to the situation we find
ourselves in, we find it absolutely necessary to give disproportionate
platform and visibility to the expression of PoC, gendernoncomforming,
non-heteronormative, and poor peoples participating in our scene, so as
to better proportion their presence in the grand scope of society’s
collective consciousness. Healing does not begin once the assailant
ceases to stab the victim, but once the blade is removed and medical
attention is applied to the wound. As such, there will be absolutely
zero tolerance for bigoted, hateful, or prejudiced actions or rhetoric
in whatever space we occupy. Displays of domination, harassment,
manipulation, or otherwise any action that violates the agency of
another human is absolutely condemned and prohibited. This includes the
endorsement of any political ideology, rhetoric, or candidate that
contributes to the proliferation of any of the aforementioned ills.
Reactionaries need not participate at any capacity.
It is these core beliefs that we predicate our values on. However, we
also understand the need to translate principled belief into practical
action. At this juncture, we would like to extinguish any ambiguity in
what we stand for in the context of our immediate, political situation.
Following is a non-exhaustive list of examples of positions we take in
adherence with our core beliefs. Mixed in with immediate political
projects are categorical calls for systemic changes, treating symptoms
as well as focusing on the core disease. Not to be categorized as a list
of demands, because we make no demands. We ask for nothing. We will
take, occupy.
tax
programs
complexes
“accessibility”
“black sites”
At this juncture, we would like to broaden the scope of discussion and
address what we hold to be the single most pressing matter at hand, and
what will be the defining struggle of the human experience for the
foreseeable future. At this moment, we are beyond the point of no return
and must rethink human existence in the context of its inevitable
reckoning, a situation brought on by our collective reluctance to
address or reconcile with exactly how dire our situation is in relation
to climate change, and now we are too late to make the necessary
adjustments to society in order to prevent the ocean temperature from
raising to 2 degrees Celsius. The problems that led to these
circumstances can no longer be fixed, the scope of runaway climate
change is far beyond our ability to impact any meaningful change in how
it unfolds, let alone whether it can be prevented. Traditional political
ideology has always been predicated on the assumption that civilization
will persist indefinitely, but now we find ourselves forced to determine
what the value of everything we hold as intrinsic knowledge of liberty,
property, and prosperity in the context of the knowledge that humanity,
as it exists at the capacity it does now, will no longer exist. Rather
than defaulting to hedonism in the face of oblivion, resigning to lives
of absolute individual liberty in order to maximize the utility of what
time we have left to meaningless pursuits of personal gratification, we
believe there are grievances that must be redressed, and that the
context of apocalypse, and specifically the conditions that lead to it,
makes it absolutely necessary that these injustices be redressed.
The situation we now inhabit is the inevitable conclusion of neoliberal
capitalism. It has allowed for industry to become powerful enough to the
point where byproducts of production and consumption exact a drastic
impact on the sustainability of the world’s climate, and then
incentivized industry to deny the reality of their impact for decades,
decades where proactive action could have led us down a more hopeful
path. Exxon has been aware of CO2’s effect since 1977, 11 years before
it came into public awareness. Senior scientist James Black once told
Exxon’s management committee that “In the first place, there is general
scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is
influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from
the burning of fossil fuels.” He also predicted that CO2 emissions would
lead to an increase in average global temperatures by 2 or 3 degrees, a
reality just recently solidified by the 2018 annual IFCC report, an
overwhelmingly bleak report that still fails to accurately portray how
dire our situation is, failing to account for the impact of permafrost
thawing and ice albedo feedback loops on CO2 emissions and global
temperature rise respectively. The weight of the inhumanity of these
actions is clearer now than ever before. The paradigm of limitless
growth, and the artificial moral duty to always expand business, and to
always deliver returns to shareholders, created a cultural environment
within the realm of private interests that allowed for the obfuscation,
misinformation, and outright falsehoods that still pollute general
discourse of the topic, fostering an illegitimate but stubborn attitude
of outright denial of climate change. Government climate research
agencies are frequently forced to withhold information from reports out
of fear of “politicizing” issues relating to climate change. The
circumstances that allowed for these things to happen are entirely the
creation of capitalism, and capitalism dictated the outcome of decisions
that were made, so it is completely reasonable to hold capitalism wholly
culpable for the circumstances we now find ourselves in.
Under the structure of the world as it is now, the people who have
suffered under capitalism, and by extension colonialism, will be the
first to suffer the effects of climate change, and will experience them
the most drastically. Naturally, the people who suffer the greatest from
extreme weather phenomenon are always those who can’t afford to not.
Food supplies are destroyed, whilst lands that have historically been
arable are suddenly unsuitable for agriculture, destroying the
livelihood of farmers, and communities that depend on agricultural
exports, further perpetuating the cycle of poverty. Mass migration of
people from rural farming areas to urban centers results in heightened
political tensions, a fact brutally demonstrated by the ongoing Syrian
Civil War, a domestic conflict influenced in part by the migration of
people from newly barren farmland in the countryside to dense, urban
cities. As time progresses, and as climate change becomes more and more
material in people’s lives, these conditions will only become worse, and
affect larger portions of the world. Ecosystems that sustain life today
by existing in a delicate climate equilibrium will be destroyed.
Ironically, these are generally the same people whose lives have already
been subject to the most material ills of capitalism. The exploitation
of labor and resources, a practice that has led to the poverty and
subjugation of nations, has resulted in massive communities of people
wholly unequipped to respond to sudden and drastic shifts in the climate
of their environments. In effect, these peoples and nations are now
nothing more than the byproducts of industry, every individual person
little more than a spent fuel cell, and are regarded as little more than
human refuse in comparison to people who are able to accrue great
amounts of capital. There is a clear disparity in the value of human
life in the world.
Capitalism and the structures that enable it to exist must be abolished,
this much is clear to us, but what to do about what already exists?
Abolishing capitalism only removes the process by which capital can be
accumulated, but it doesn’t address the material inequality it has
caused. This is not so much a case of punishment, but a pursuit of
justice, a phrase which here means a return to equilibrium of property,
in that materials are equally distributed amongst all people
proportional to need. In this sense, we must not view property
redistribution as a punitive act, but as a retributive one. We must
envision ourselves as palliative doctors, providing hospice care for a
terminal human existence, and in the process achieve a virtuous epilogue
for the human experience.
“Let’s go lets go” -Jammin Gerald, Pump That Shit Up