💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › raoul-vaneigem-beyond-the-impossible.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 13:48:20. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-06-20)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Beyond the Impossible Author: Raoul Vaneigem Date: 2012 Language: en Topics: age, anti-economy, banks, fear, God, leftism, money, Poetry, right-wing populism, state power Source: Retrieved on 17th January 2019 from http://www.notbored.org/beyond-the-impossible.html Notes: Published in L’Impossible #2, April 2012. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! on 16 May 2012.
“To deny society, one must attack its language.” – Guy Debord.
The impossible is a closed universe. Nevertheless, we possess the key to
it and, as we’ve suspected for millennia, its door opens on a field of
infinite possibilities. More than ever, this field belongs to us, to
explore and cultivate. The key is neither magic nor symbolic. The
ancient Greeks called it “poetry,” from the verb poiein, to construct,
to fashion, to create.
Ever since market civilization instaurated the reign of princes and
priests – the lamentable remains of whom continue to swarm upon God’s
cadaver – the dogma of the innate weakness and deficiency of men and
women hasn’t ceased to be taught, at the expense of creativity, which is
the human faculty par excellence. Do not the laws of power and profit
condemn the child to age prematurely by teaching him or her to work, to
consume, and to exhibit him or herself on the market of slaves, where
competitive craftiness stifles the intelligence of the heart and
solidarity?
We are exposed to a constant denaturation in which life is emptied of
its substance, while the necessity of survival is reduced to the
animalistic quest for subsistence. The uncertain right to existence is
acquired at the cost of a predatory comportment that converts fear into
cash and profits from it.
While socially useful work – natural agriculture, schools, hospitals,
metallurgy, transportation – becomes rarefied and degraded, parasitical
work – subject to financial imperatives – governs the States and peoples
[of the world] in the name of a financial bubble that is condemned to
implode. Fear reigns and responds to fear. The populist Right
recuperates working class [populaire] anger. It designates
interchangeable scapegoats – Jews, Arabs, Muslims, the unemployed,
homosexuals, people from Mediterranean countries, intellectuals,
outsiders – and thus prevents attacks on a system that threatens the
entire planet. At the same time, the populist Left channels indignation
into demonstrations, the spectacular character of which completely
dispenses with any veritable subversive project. The nec plus ultra of
radicalism consists in burning the banks and organizing gladiator
combats between cops and rioters when such combat in the arena weakens
the solidity of the banking-swindling system and the States that
unanimously take on base works.
Fear, resignation, fatalism and voluntary servitude everywhere darken
the minds of individuals and rally crowds to the heels of the tribunes
and representative of the people, who draw from their cretinization the
last profits to be had from an unsteady power.
How to struggle against the weight of the obscurantism that – from
conservatism to the spiteful and impotent revolt of Leftism – maintains
the lethargy of despair, ally of all the tyrannies, no matter how
revolting, ridiculous or absurd they are? To have done with the diverse
forms of gregariousness, whose bleating and screaming punctuate the
route to the slaughterhouse, I do not see any other way than reviving
the dialogue that is at the heart of each person’s existence, the
dialogue between the desire to live and the objurgations of a programmed
death.
By what aberration do we consent to pay for the goods – water,
vegetables, air, fertile earth, renewable and free sources of energy –
that nature provides us with? By what self-contempt do we judge it
impossible to blow away – with the living breath of human aspirations –
the economy that programs its own annihilation by monopolizing and
sacking the world? How to continue to believe that money is
indispensible when it pollutes everything it touches?
It is in the logic of things that the exploiters attempt to convince the
exploited of their ineluctable inferiority. But what’s scandalous is
that people who revolt and revolutionaries allow themselves to be
imprisoned in the artificial circle of the impossible. I do not know how
much time will pass before the bronze tables of the law of profit are
broken into pieces, but a truly human society will not exist unless the
dogma of our incapability to found a society on the true richness of
being (the faculty of creating oneself and recreating the world) is
broken.
Perhaps it would be indispensible to repeat the following tirelessly,
until these life-bearing words create an opening in the petrified forest
where frozen and gelatinous words consecrate the power of a coldly
profitable death: yes, it is possible to have done with corrupt
democracy by instaurating direct democracy; yes, it is possible to push
further the experiment of the Spanish libertarian collectives of 1936
and put generalized self-management to work; yes, it is possible to
recreate abundance and what’s free by refusing to pay and putting an end
to the reign of money; yes, it is possible to get rid of racketeering
[affairisme] by strictly adopting the recommendation “We will take care
of our affairs ourselves”; and, yes, it is possible to pass beyond the
diktats of the State, the threats of the financial mafias, and the
[demands of] political predators of every stripe.
If we do not exit from economic reality by constructing a human reality,
we will once more allow market cruelty to rage and perpetuate itself.
The battle that unfolds, on the terrain of everyday life, between the
desire to live fully and the slow agony of an existence supported by
work, money and rotten pleasures is the same battle that attempts to
preserve the quality of our environment against the ravages of the
market economy. The schools, natural agricultural products, public
transportation networks, hospitals, health clinics, herbal medicines,
water, invigorating air, renewable and free energy-sources, and
socially-useful goods (made by workers cynically despoiled of their
production) belong to us. Let’s stop paying for what is ours.
Life surpasses [prime] the economy. The liberty of the living revokes
the liberties of commerce. It will henceforth be on this terrain that
the battle is fought.