💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › miguel-amoros-interview-with-ruta-66.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 12:25:40. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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

Title: Interview with Ruta 66
Author: Jaime Gonzalo
Date: April 2016
Language: en
Topics: interview, music, situationist, postmodernism, Spain
Source: Retrieved on 11th May 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/interview-ruta-66-miguel-amor%C3%B3s
Notes: A slightly abridged version of this interview, in the original Spanish, was published in Ruta 66, July 2016. See: http://www.jaimegonzalo.com/entrevistas/miquel-amoros-nostalgia-rock-arma-de-lucha/. Translated in September 2016 from an unabridged transcript of an interview with Miguel Amorós conducted by Jaime Gonzalo for Ruta 66. Transcript provided by Miguel Amorós.

Jaime Gonzalo

Interview with Ruta 66

He is not an expert on rock music, but he wrote a very revealing

socio-political analysis that rescued rock n’ roll’s revolutionary

dimension from oblivion. A powerful critical voice, well-versed in

anarchism and situationism, under his outward appearance of a

mild-mannered retiree reluctantly relegated to a passive existence

simmers an unquenchable thinker. His ideas help us to understand the

world in which we (do not) live.

Even the dead have to fight for the truth. The protagonist of

Maupassant’s short story, “Was It a Dream?”, goes to the cemetery to

mourn at the grave of his beloved who had died unexpectedly. There, he

witnesses an extraordinary scene. “I saw that all the graves were open,

that all the dead bodies had emerged from them, and that all had effaced

the lies inscribed on the gravestones by their relations, substituting

the truth instead…. They were all writing at the same time, on the

threshold of their eternal abode, the truth, the terrible and the holy

truth of which everybody was ignorant, or pretended to be ignorant,

while they were alive.” Even greater was the shock of the terrified

widower when he saw that his deceased wife was no exception. On her

tombstone, where he had caused to be engraved, “She loved, was loved,

and died”, now he read, “Having gone out in the rain one day, in order

to deceive her lover, she caught cold and died.”

It seems that what really bothers us about what we do not accomplish

before we die is no longer the collision with the truth about ourselves,

but rather with the truth about what determines our lives; perhaps

because we are annoyed by just how obvious it is. Many wise voices have

spoken out to tell us this, but one of the most resonant is that of the

historian and essayist, Miguel Amorós (Alcoy, 1949). An avid seeker

after this truth about the situation that they have programmed us to

accept with lies and substitutes for life, his talks and writings

constitute expressions of some of the most stimulating examples of

contemporary Spanish critical thought. The occasion of the publication

of another book by this author has given us an opportunity to enjoy,

question and/or learn from his lucidity.

Jaime Gonzalo, for Ruta 66 [JG]: You converted to anarchism at the age

of 18, at a time when the anarchist movement had been practically

neutralized in the collective memory of Spain, and you founded or

co-founded several anarchist organizations. A risky decision, fraught

with sacrifice, in view of the fact that you lived in Franco’s Spain and

your family had a background in that movement and you knew what fate

might await you…. What are your impressions of this venture, what led

you to make such a decision and what real possibilities did you think

existed at the time that you thought you might take advantage of?

Miguel Amorós [MA]: Damned Wikipedia! I never converted to anything, it

was not a matter of religious faith. I come from a classic working class

family that was traumatized by the years immediately following the war,

a miserable time of repression and poverty. In Alcoy, a city with deep

roots in the anarchist and syndicalist movements, there was not a single

soul committed to the cause of the workers who was not in hiding, in

jail or in exile. Although the figure of my maternal grandfather was

very much present in my family’s memory, I was never given too many

details. The mentality of the survivor for whom nothing good can come

from remembering the past: that was the limbo in which these matters

resided during my entire adolescence. The road of rebellion arose for me

as a kind of spiritual rash. The prospect that life offered was a good

job, marriage with children, a house with a mortgage, a compact car and

a television, the idiot box. Others have more effectively described this

feeling of internal emptiness and anxiety that one suffers when at the

end of puberty one is pushed to submerge oneself “in the glacial water

of egoistic calculation” (Marx). I did not want to live the way I was

ordered to live, wallowing in the mud of conventionality and repeating

the vulgar gestures of the philistines. I found the authoritarianism

that seemed to impregnate the anodyne life of my contemporaries

distasteful, and I was even more repelled by its corollary, compulsory

submission. I was curious and unsettled, I was eager to have some fun

and to break things and I also had a strong desire to live—which at that

age has a strong component of sexual desire. That’s how it all began.

Anarchism came later, when I went to college and I came up against

“carrillismo”, the Spanish Stalinism of the sixties, which was just as

reactionary as its previous republican version. My “conversion” was not

due to readings on this topic because no such texts existed at the time,

but rather to an instinctive reaction against the opportunism of people

whose vocation was to become manipulative and dictatorial bureaucrats,

and who passed themselves off as the vanguard of the opposition to

Franco.

JG: You paid a high price for the experience, you were sentenced to

prison. What was it like in prison and what did you learn behind bars?

MA: My bad adventures and, why not, my bad reading, led me to prison. My

father told me it was the latter, and by bad reading he meant all of the

reading I had been doing. I was only in “the slammer” for a little

while, I don’t think I did four months, each in a different prison. None

of them exist today, of course. The former prison in Valencia is now an

office building of the Generalitat and the Alicante prison is now used

for temporary detention of convicted criminals. My family was keeping a

very close watch over me and they did not let me down. I did not learn

much from life in prison, but I did find it diverting. There was a

higher proportion of good people among the ordinary prisoners in the

prison than there was on the outside, and there was a vast number of

stories to hear, true or invented. The worst thing about the experience

was the subsequent consequences. When I was released, there was a file

on me and I was forbidden from entering the University district. I could

not work as a teacher, or have a passport, or even hang out at the gym,

because all of these things required a certificate of “good conduct”.

Then I burned my bridges. I never looked back.

JG: Recently there have been occasional news reports in the

disinformation media referring to the capture and dismantling of

anarchist cells. It is hard to believe, after the ideological purge

carried out during the 80s with the advent of “democracy”, that there is

still any real anarchism left in Spain, except in the framework of an

excuse to carry out repression. This anarchist path, is it exhausted,

does it make any sense in today’s world, is it possible to think of a

future anarchism?

MA: These incidents are of course set-ups whose goal is to fabricate a

public enemy that will make it possible to justify the passage of

regressive laws like the gag law, police brutality and law and order

policies. Most of these set-ups were conceived in or near the building

which houses the Department of the Interior of the Generalitat in

Sabadell. The post-Franco parliamentary regime had to eliminate the

libertarian features of the autonomous workers movement that emerged in

the last years of the dictatorship, which had led to the return of a

living corpse, the CNT, which many people clung to as a last resort of

anti-authoritarianism. This anarchist road was historically superseded,

but it did not succumb solely due to its own contradictions but also

because of a policy of industrial restructuring that was very

effectively administered by the PSOE, which turned the factory-based

working class into a museum exhibit. Anarchism as a complete ideology, a

cookbook and a storehouse of clichés, has no future. Anarchism is best

understood as an aspiration to a full life, one that is fraternal and

communitarian, without institutions that escape the control of the

collectivity, where the connections between persons are direct and

egalitarian, not mediated by things. To the extent that social struggles

are oriented towards these goals and use means that do not contradict

them, then anarchism has a future.

JG: When you first became involved with anarchism, the struggle against

Franco was already underway and there was quite a lot of student unrest,

which you discuss in your book, 1968. El año sublime de la acracia

[1968: The Sublime Year of Acracy]. Since democratization, many people

have draped themselves in an alleged anti-Franco past as if it was an

academic degree to be listed on their resumes. How much of that struggle

was myth and mystification?

MA: 1968 was my first year of college, not when I became an anarchist,

at a time when I rejected all authority and no program of demands

satisfied me, either. I felt a kind of existential boiling rage against

the whole status quo, similar to what other people felt. It was a state

of mind that was seizing the youth of the planet and which was bearing

fruit in revolts of another kind. Our revolt had the virtue of nipping

in the bud the first internal attempts at democratization carried out by

the Franco regime, thus forcing it to show its true face with the state

of emergency of 1969. These attempts only came to fruition with the

death of the dictator, since everyone knows that the apparatus of the

dictatorship and the socialist-communist opposition agreed on a

Transition to parliamentarism that was stage-managed from the highest

levels of power, and sealed with a pact of silence and an amnesty that

exonerated the criminals of Franco’s regime. The immense majority of the

new leaders of the “left” came from either dissident factions within the

Franco regime, or from the last-minute opposition. Practically all of

them had to improvise an imaginary resume, since almost none of them

could truthfully claim that their political activity extended to the

period before 1975. The so-called “democracy”, which is no more of a

democracy than Podemos, was not forged in the crucible of the streets,

but in the halls of power.

JG: After you were released from prison you went into exile in

France—what year was that?—and there you made contact with the

situationists. What was known about the situationists at the time in

Spain and how could you obtain their works when you lived on the

Peninsula?

MA: I secretly crossed the border to freedom, with the help of my

brother and a friend, and I took refuge in Paris. That was in April or

May of 1975. For several years before that date, the theoretical impasse

of classical anarchism, as well as the inconsistent and capitulatory

conduct of the leaders of the CNT during the war, who renounced

everything “except victory”, led me towards the situationist critique, a

modern and coherent view of the class struggle, methodologically

Marxist-Hegelian, but which distilled what was essential from anarchism

and from the artistic vanguards, that is, the liberation of desire and

the subversion of everyday life. The Situationist International

dissolved in 1972, so it was impossible for me to make contact with it.

I did, however, meet Jaime Semprun, who had ephemeral relations with

Eduardo Rothe and Guy Debord in connection with the Portuguese

“Carnation” Revolution.

JG: A fascinating and enigmatic personality: in Paris you knew Guy

Debord personally and you worked with him. What was he like when the

going got tough? Did he coherently exhibit the intransigence that his

analysis reflected with respect to reality? I mean, just how “authentic”

was he, and to what degree did he scorn the temptations of the system he

fought against?

MA: I never knew Debord personally; I only exchanged some letters with

him in 1981 when I was participating in his campaign on behalf of the

liberation of the anarchist prisoners. Then I maintained relations with

him for a couple of years through the mediation of third parties (Jaime

Semprun and Christian Sebastiani). Although it might seem hard to

believe, he was easy to deal with. Problems arose with differences of

opinion. His conversation was very one-track; rather than engaging in a

dialogue, he engaged in a monologue. When it came to women he was

terrible. He allowed himself to be swept away by momentary impressions,

by details, by unexpected separations: One might feel that one was the

crème de la elite revolutionnaire and the next minute one might be

treated like a noxious reactionary. He was the most authentic and most

lucid person of his time, the most artistic of the revolutionaries and

the most revolutionary of the artists. He never made the slightest

concession to the cultural or political circles that he profoundly

despised. He was undoubtedly someone special, generous, impassioned,

sometimes unjust; a strong, unique personality, a genius who always

walked on the wild side, a really free being who of his own free will

broke the cup of life when it had been drained to the dregs.

JG: I have always thought that the “rebellious” potential of icons like

Marlon Brando in “The Wild One”, or the pre-RCA Elvis, and this even

goes for the Counterculture as a whole, amounts to nothing compared with

the subversive charisma of Debord. Was Debord’s revolution the only

genuine “spiritual” revolution of the 50s and 60s?

MA: Debord was never an icon of anything, he was always engaged in a

continuous war against the society of the spectacle, he was permanently

ensconced in negativity. Even now it is no easy matter to recuperate him

as a spectacular image of lucidity, and the merchants of culture who are

trying to do so are only mutilating Debord’s radicality and

aestheticizing him, without managing to turn out a credible figure.

Debord turned revolution into an art and he did the same thing with his

life. He was someone who led the way in the vanguard of his time, but he

did not embody that vanguard as a whole. His contribution was decisive,

but it was not the only one. We need only think of André Breton, Daniel

Guerin, Simone Weil, Lewis Mumford, Siegfried Krakauer, Murray Bookchin,

Herbert Marcuse, Gunther Anders, Dwight MacDonald, Jaime Semprun,

Agustín García Calvo, and others.

JG: From exile you saw the consolidation in Spain of the construct of

the Transition, a farce that you had already exposed, with Jaime

Semprun, in 1976 with “The Manuscript Found in Vitoria”. Did you ever

discuss this topic with Debord?

MA: Before the “Manuscript”, we published “The Spanish Campaign of the

European Revolution”, in which we discussed the workers struggles in the

assemblies and pointed to the possibility that they might develop into a

coordinated system of proletarian councils. The Transition can be

interpreted as an attempt to abort this process that threatened to get

out of control; the Transition was half opposition, with the trade

unionists in the forefront, and half dictatorship, whose public face was

the police. At the time, Debord had a falling out with Jaime and he

prevented the French publisher, Champ Libre, from publishing the

“Manuscript”, which, as it turned out, was all for the best, because the

pamphlet was published in Spanish and distributed in Spain.

JG: While the constitutional monarchy was being established here, the

PSOE under González was created with the stroke of a pen and we were

reminded of that famous saying of Lampedusa concerning this change in

which nothing changed, you persevered in situationist praxis by

collaborating with the journal of critical thought known as the

Encyclopédie des Nuisances, which was in some ways an heir of the

Situationist International. What can you tell us, objectively, about

this journey?

MA: You are talking about two different periods. When I returned from

exile I got involved with a few working class friends in activity in

favor of “Proletarian Autonomy and Social Revolution”, a very workerist,

libertarian councilist project, halfway between the ICO and the SI

(Informations Correspondance Ouvrières and the Situationist

International). The defeat of the strike wave led by the assembly

movement was made possible by the employers’ insistent support for the

legalized trade unions, the activities of the parties, and the

repression unleashed by the authorities, which then commenced their

strategy of tension by infiltrating the extremist organizations to

foment inexplicable attacks like the one at La Scala. The Moncloa

Accords put an end to the revolutionary class struggle in the Spanish

State. In France, a strong anti-nuclear movement arose that could have

become radicalized in contact with the movements of resistance to

industrial restructuring, and, on another level, in contact with the

radical sectors of the Polish (Solidarnosc) and the Russian (SMOT)

workers movements. There is a curious song by the Angelic Upstarts about

this. That was the era of the magazine, L’Assommoir, the book, The

Nuclearization of the World, which I translated into Spanish, and the

third pamphlet of Los Incontrolados. The demands of the anti-nuclear

movement would not go beyond a moratorium on the construction of nuclear

reactors, and this created an opportunity for the green parties. The

environmentalists immediately got involved in politics in order to work

on behalf of a green capitalism and to undermine the protest movements,

and that is what they are still doing. The Encyclopédie, formed in 1984,

was an attempt to come to grips with this reality and to conduct a

critical analysis of the social conflict of the 1960s. We had a feeling

that the work that awaited us would be comparable to the work of the SI,

with respect to its importance.

JG: Despite the enmity, based on his congenital inferiority complex,

that Alfonso Guerra felt for him, Jorge Semprún, the father of Jaime

Semprún, the driving force behind the Encyclopédie des Nuisances, was

named Minister of Culture by Felipe. How did this news affect the

journal?

MA: It didn’t really matter. It had been fifteen years since Jaime had

broken with his father, whom he considered to be a bourgeoisified

intellectual who had spent many years as an accomplice of the

Stalinists. The news did however give rise to some jokes. Jorge Semprún

was the paradigm of the organic intellectual, egolatrous and

chameleon-like, a seller of himself and a model for social climbers.

JG: What circumstances were responsible for your return to Spain—and in

what year—and what was your impression when you arrived and saw how

Iberian democracy was developing on the ground….

MA: In late 1976 I got a passport from the embassy and the first thing I

did was to take a trip through England, just when the punk scene was

getting underway. In April of 1977 I returned to the Peninsula and I

made arrangements to print “The Manuscript Found in Vitoria”. There was

a lot going on in Barcelona, but it was mostly dominated by frivolity

and fashionable radical chic. The confusion increased and the most

diametrically opposed camps intermingled: some apathetic passerby might

lie down to take a nap in the Parque Güell and wake up as a nationalist

in the middle of an Estatut d’Autonomía demonstration. The proletarian

offensive was broken on March 3, 1976 in Vitoria/Gasteiz, but the

workers movement still enraged Franco’s heirs, whether of the right or

the left. With a handful of associates I plunged into a wandering

itinerary from one hot-spot of struggle to another. I especially recall

the strikes of the ceramics industry workers in Castellón and the shoe

industry workers in Alicante.

JG: Since then your activity in the critical sphere has been

constant—could you also tell me about your activity as it was related to

earning a living, your career as a teacher—and you have constructed your

own platform, the publishing house/journal Argelaga, which defines

itself as “anti-developmentalist and libertarian” and which to some

degree constitutes a new version of the Encyclopédie. As a publisher,

what degree of real, more or less proven interest, do you believe exists

at this time in Spain with respect to critical thought and the unmasking

of that which determines our everyday lives?

MA: I signed up with the assembly of unemployed teachers and the only

position that I managed to get was as an elementary school teacher. I

began the course in 1979–80 and I obtained a stable job that allowed me

to avoid dreading each day as a struggle to survive. The prospect for

radical change in Spain had evaporated. Tejero’s coup terrified the

personnel of the State and that hybrid of Franco’s Spain and

parliamentarism that they called “democracy” was imposed as the lesser

of two evils. Meanwhile, the Berlin Wall fell. In France, a radical

anti-nuclear movement re-emerged after the accident at Chernobyl in 1987

and the “Irradiated People of the World, Unite!” Committee, whose

positions were close to our own, was formed. During the same period,

there were protests against large-scale, pointless projects like

building highways and the high speed train. In the Encyclopédie we

imagined that we were at the threshold of a new cycle of struggles,

which we defined as anti-industrial struggles. We put our support behind

these struggles and we formed, with some other people, an Alliance

against All Harmful Phenomena [Nuisances]. Later, I think it was in

1993, at the suggestion of Semprun, the Éditions de l’Encyclopédie des

Nuisances was established, in which I played a very minor role. At that

time I was working on a historical review of anarchism during the

revolutionary civil war. My first book was about The Friends of Durruti

Group, founded by Jaime Balius; my second book was on the Iron Column;

my third was devoted to the Andalusian anarchist, Francisco Maroto; my

fourth book was on Durruti during the civil war. Argelaga belongs to a

later stage; that was a project that was conceived in 2013 in close

cooperation with Joan B. that followed in the footsteps of interesting

antecedents like the Boletín de Los Amigos de Ludd [Bulletin of the

Friends of Ludd], publishers like Muturreko, Etcétera, the Raíces

[Roots] journal or the old magazine Ekintza Zuzena. These are not good

times for critique, now that we have a reformist middle class that is

trying to resolve the crisis with an “assault” on legislative seats.

Everything that comes from political realism is viewed with jaundiced

eyes, but that is how it is.

JG: One of the titles listed in Argelaga’s catalogue is your book, Rock

para principiantes [Rock for Beginners] (2014), a highly condensed but

instructive synthesis of the development and consumerist assimilation of

this culture. Why did you write that book….

MA: It started with a conversation in a bar with a friend of mine from

Alcoy who was involved with an online journal called MISC. I was

surprised by the fact that the ignorance of the new generations involves

more than just forgetting the historical memory of revolutions and has

embraced one of the most typical manifestations of the youth of the

sixties. No one remembered anything from before the era of punk. What

poverty!

JG: What was your relation to rock? I suppose that because you grew up

in Valencia, one of the most prolific provinces for the Spanish pop

music of the sixties, this would be a determinant factor….

MA: When I was a little kid I listened to rock and to every kind of

music that was played on the radio. I even learned to sing in the chorus

of my school. The small cities and villages preserved some vitality and

during the sixties bands were formed in even the most remote places that

imitated the Beatles, the Shadows, Presley, the Teen Tops, etc., and

performed versions of the most popular pop and soul songs. I liked rock,

but I was not gifted with interpretive talent. I wasn’t into the

singer-songwriter genre, either. I liked Dylan but I despised what

Raimon, Ovidi, Pi de la Serra and Lluis Llach were doing; it sounded

like an opportunist copy, hollow, like pseudo-transcendent poetry.

Nothing comparable to “The Times They Are A-Changin’”. They were the

musical wing of the opposition that made a deal with franquismo to

create the disgusting particratic regime we have now. Just look at how

the front row of seats at one of Raimon’s latest concerts is full of

Ministers, political bigwigs and old trade unionists who sold out. I

will stick with Nadine’s coffee-colored Cadillac, Chuck Berry’s first

single.[1] That was less pretentious and more authentic.

JG: In Rock for Beginners you conclude that no subsequent musical style

“has broken out of its particular ghetto, because none of them could

express the universal hopes of freedom and self-realization like the

rock of that era; they taught no lessons that could be forgotten, nor

did they challenge the established order very effectively, nor did they

fan the flames of protest for very long”. You also say that pop music

“therefore became the bearer of truth, which, according to Hegel, is

also beauty, and is spontaneously manifested, subjective and incomplete,

appealing to the senses—or ‘good vibrations’—instead of reason, the

spirit of the modern social revolution”. I partly agree with both of

these opinions, but I get the feeling that they harbor a certain

idealization that I suppose has something to do with the fact that you

were there, when you were young, so that there might be an element of

nostalgia or Proustian longing for days gone by.

MA: I, too, have been burned, like Nerval, by the rays of “the black sun

of melancholy”. Nostalgia, more or less. In the past rock was a catalyst

of revolutionary energies and nostalgia tends to idealize this. We

recall a time when the monotonous vulgarity of the present was not

thought to be creative and original, when authenticity stole in through

the cracks that the prevailing monotony could not seal. Yearning for

what has been lost has not turned me into a pathetic old rocker like

Miguel Ríos, but I use it as a weapon in the struggle for a different

kind of future than the one that our leaders want to impose on us.

JG: Your most recent book is Filosofía en el tocador [Philosophy in the

Boudoir] (2016), a collection of transcripts of talks, texts and

introductions that contains, if not all, at least a good share of the

main themes of your discourse. Beginning with the truth. “In a world

dominated by capitalist irrationality, truth is only a moment of the

false. Its revelation no longer changes anything”. How have we descended

into this new dark age, which is so blindingly illuminated?

MA: That was a paraphrase of one of the theses from Guy Debord’s Society

of the Spectacle, and Debord’s thesis was a détournement of a quotation

from Hegel. The products of social activity, whether they are

commodities or institutions, escape from the control of the producers,

and confront them as separate powers. Human relations are no longer

direct and have become mediated by things or images, they have become

dehumanized. This is called alienation. Being is transposed outside of

the self. Reality is concealed by appearance. And truth is concealed by

falsehood. How did we reach this point? At first, gradually, thanks to a

process of colonization of the world by the commodity and a gradual

replacement of society by the State. Then, during the time of the

spectacle, with the unification of Capital and the State, all at once.

JG: Speaking of fascism, you point out that under such a regime,

“thought or the search for the truth is not valued, because the social

order is exclusively based on the bald-faced lie”. At this very moment

in Spain, and in many other places, the same thing is happening….

MA: Postmodernism, which is the philosophical reaction in late

capitalism, has relativized the truth, putting it on the same level with

the lie. It was an attempt to abolish the points of reference on the

basis of which objective statements could be made. In politics this is

the job of the spectacle, or as they used to say, propaganda. Power has

at its disposal a media apparatus of disinformation and

non-communication thanks to which it transmits its messages and orders,

and compliance is monitored by way of a sophisticated mechanism of

control. What we have is a peaceful conditioning of the population that

is politely leading us to a police state. The particratic regime is very

similar to the Nazi regime with respect to the way it functions, except

that it is based on persuasion and does not resort to violence except in

extreme cases.

JG: The neutralization of truth seems to be a direct consequence of the

neutralization of History, another one of your concerns. Somewhere you

say that “History is tragic, because contradictions are incubated and

develop within it that can only be resolved in violent struggle … the

secret will be revealed only to the spectators of the macabre last act.”

Is violence the only possible way to retrieve History from those who

write it? Is knowing the secret worth so much trouble?

MA: That quotation pertains to one of the main conclusions of Hegel’s

philosophy of history. George Orwell, in his book 1984, exposed the

totalitarian principle that “ignorance is strength”. The erasure of

memory is a weapon to control the past used by those who control the

present. And, once again returning to 1984, “those who control the

present control the future”. Obviously, the controllers will not

abdicate of their own free will, but will have to be evicted. Is it

worth the trouble? I would answer that with another question: is it

worth the trouble to live in ignorance? The truth will make you free, as

the New Testament says. When we allow ourselves to be administered by

the State and represented by the parties we are permitted to live in a

kingdom of forgetting where the aurea mediocritas [golden mean] is the

final goal, although I am afraid that, the way things are going, not

even this goal is within the reach of many people. The truth will make

us free, but the truth alone will not make us happy.

JG: History is above all else Memory, you say, but there is nonetheless

the paradox of Historical Memory, that invention of Pierre Nora, by

means of which the past could also be imagined. Was Hassan-i Sabbah

therefore correct when he said that “nothing is true and everything is

permitted”?

MA: That saying does not come from Hassan i-Sabbah but from a German

orientalist from the early 19^(th) century, Hammer Purgstall, who

abusively reduced the entire Ismaelite doctrine to that principle for

the purpose of exposing the disastrous influence of secret societies on

weak governments. The French Revolution had such a profound impact on

conservative thought that it caused the proponents of the latter to

believe in a universal and perpetual conspiracy that started with the

medieval heretics, and, passing through the Templars and the Jesuits,

found a home among the Masonic lodges, the alleged culprits behind the

revolution. Si non e vero, e ben trovato![2] The conspiracies of

nihilist fanatics are nonetheless very much a contemporary phenomenon

when it comes to power’s tactics of disinformation, by means of which

power manufactures the terrorist image of its enemies, whether

anarchists or Islamic fundamentalists.

JG: In the text, Genealogía del pensamiento débil [Genealogy of Weak

Thought], you speak of a “submissive thought that serves as the watchdog

over subversive appearances” and of “consumers of ideology who want the

prestige of revolt and the comfort of order at the same time”. It would

appear that this can be applied to 15M, to podemismo and to the whole

new political (re)generation that seems to amount to a project to sell

the youth to their leaders, like rock.

MA: Weak thought, post-structuralism and deconstructionism—French

Theory—arose as a reaction against May ’68. Its goal was to destroy

revolutionary thought by presenting it as the bearer of totalitarianism.

The technophile generation of 15M was weaned on its postulates, its

topics, and its pseudo-radicalism. It is not a generation that advocates

the dismantling of capitalism and the dissolution of the State, that

builds barricades and turns its back on institutions, but very much the

contrary. It is a generation of the prematurely aged, which criminalizes

those who defend themselves from the police, and lays claim to the

streets in order to transform them into high-tech discotheques,

rehabilitating the old fetishes with cosmic glitter.

JG: Podemos, which you have referred to as “the remake of the United

Left [Izquierda Unida]”, is the product of the so-called civil society

movement, which you have characterized as an “assault on the easy

chairs” and concerning which you are very critical: “the presence of

politicians of a new kind who hold the balance of power alongside other,

more well-known politicians, is a factor of stability for the

particratic caste and gives it a shot of legitimacy”.

MA: The communists have always been the vanguard of the

counterrevolution. If, forty years ago, with a strong workers movement,

this vanguard took the form of a workers party, now, without any

prospects of revolution on the horizon, this same vanguard acquires the

lineaments of a renovated social democracy. These days, the seizure of

power is not based on channeling the violence unleashed by the class

struggle, but on the frustration of the members of the bourgeoisified

middle class, who think of themselves as the “citizenry”. The “assault

on the institutions” is nothing but the electoral exploitation of the

disillusionment of “civil society”. You only need to take a look at the

institutional conduct of Podemos and its partners to realize that they

have not regenerated anything, but are reaffirming everything just as it

is.

JG: Postmodernism is another one of your bêtes noires. You define it as

reactionary, as expressing the predominance of individual interests, the

immediate satisfaction of false needs, unconsciousness, ignorance,

manipulated desires and a spirit that is content with increasingly less

convincing substitutes. Have people like Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida and

Baudrillard been that pernicious?

MA: The situationists coined the term, “recuperation”, to refer to the

operation of devitalization and pillage of critical thought by way of an

incoherent, confusionist, and frankly superficial discourse, which could

only serve the purposes of the established order. The recuperators of

the past used the university as their base of operations, disseminating

a flood of frivolous and pretentious literature that presently serves as

a “toolbox” for our contemporary recuperators, who are much more

numerous than their predecessors. The impostors that you mention were no

worse than their admiring readers: they were just doing their jobs.

JG: One of the pillars of submissive thought, you say, is “the

theoretical annihilation of the subject of consciousness”. You give the

impression that, confronted by this assault, one must be on high alert

twenty-four hours a day. You cannot even sleep, for by doing so you run

the risk of ending up like the protagonists in “The Invasion of the Body

Snatchers”. Living like that is so stifling….

MA: As the English say, Don’t panic.[3] My statement refers to the

efforts of the ideologues of submission to prevent the formation of a

conscious collective—we could call it a historical force, or a class.

Not letting yourself get dragged around by your nose is something that

does not demand any special lucidity, nor does it generate an anxiety

that could deprive us of sleep. When we wake up we will still be the

same people.

JG: In your opinion, technology has been a major ally for

turbo-capitalism in its quest to proletarianize the world and to

disseminate that postmodern mentality based on “narcissism, existential

emptiness, frivolity, consumerism, the absence of any serious

commitment, fear, loneliness, emotional problems and problems with

relationships, vapid gregariousness, the worship of success, [and]

political ‘realism’”. Whenever I take the subway and I see everyone

absorbed in their smart phones, I think of the zombie movies. Will this

get worse?

MA: There is a law that is inherent to our contemporary way of life that

can be expressed as follows: “Everything that can get worse, will get

worse.” Technology has always been the great ally of Capital, dixit

Marx, since every technological innovation has increased the yield of

the means of production and abolished jobs. It has not ceased to do so,

but has allowed everyday life to enter the domain of the economy. The

most insignificant gesture of private life can be source of profit if it

is correctly mechanized and capitalized. Technology allows the logic of

the market to penetrate into everyday life in ways that would have been

unimaginable only a few years ago. The same goes for levels of

surveillance. The body snatchers that you mentioned are now a technical

possibility thanks to nanotechnology.

JG: One of your more striking premises is that the suppression of the

working class, or, more precisely, of its consciousness, was the

greatest counterrevolutionary achievement of capitalism. It is in fact

remarkable to observe how, in documentaries about the 1970s, at the

threshold of the transitional con game, one can see working class people

who are much more well-informed ideologically, with articulate and

educated opinions. Now, this slave class is more concerned with sales at

Primark and its “discourse” has become illiterate….

MA: The Transition had an economic dimension. National capitalism was

dissolved into larger market structures until everything was globalized.

The tertiarization of the economy overwhelmingly diminished the role of

labor in the productive sector and led to a corresponding increase of

labor in the service sector. This shift of wage labor from one sector to

another entailed the effects of massification, social uprooting and

anomie in the proletariat. The relative economic prosperity that was

brought by pensions, unlimited credit and civil service jobs submerged

the wage earning masses in conformism and locked them up within private

life, which allowed others to pursue politics as a well-remunerated job,

with revolving doors that guaranteed that they would never lose their

source of income.

JG: In fact, the middle class has also been abolished, it has been

turned into a wage earning class, “a docile being ready to sacrifice its

convictions and its dignity for the comfort of the automobile, family

life, social security and a pension. This fear of losing its status on

the market and this lack of self-respect prepared it for every

renunciation”. Is this the worst kind of fear?

MA: The acquisitive level of the middle class has been partially

reduced, but its mentality is still intact. Its fear, however, has grown

exponentially, and the task of every good government consists in the

correct management of this fear. Saint-Just said in one of his speeches

that “all other arts have produced masterpieces, but the art of

government has only produced monsters”. We are already familiar with

some of these monsters, called politicians, but we do not pay as much

attention to the masses of slaves, who, to preserve their lives as

stockyard cattle, are ready to bow down before anyone who instills them

with a need for this condition and to stigmatize all those who are

excluded from this vast paradise.

JG: You emphasize the fact that the “crisis” that has generated this

fear and this uncertainty has not been translated into a demand for

drastic changes, as common sense might perhaps lead one to expect: “In

the masses affected by this trend, a sceptical, possibilist attitude

predominates, since festive and cretinous submission is inevitable in

societies suffering from anomie. Phenomena such as precarious jobs,

pauperization and exclusion have not led to significant social

conflicts, unlike what had happened only a few decades before.” Anomie

now seems just as coterminous with our existence as the fact that human

nature can descend yet further into degradation….

MA: In mass society, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, individuals are

incapable of normal relations with each other. So we have the paradox

that crowds engender isolation, and isolation engenders fear and

neuroses. A society of solitary individuals does not admit any norms of

conduct that are valid for all, since it is a disordered mass of persons

without any possibility of communicating directly and normally with each

other. The norms must be imposed from the outside, from the state

apparatus, by way of mechanisms of surveillance and police coercion.

JG: A State like our contemporary State, you pointed out, paraphrasing

Debord, which is contrary to reason, to life and to so many other

things, “is condemned to aberration and collapse”. No one would say such

a thing today, seeing as this State perpetuates itself even as its

nature is becoming more obvious, as is now happening in Spain. What do

you think about these opinion polls that indicate so much support at the

voting booth for the PP and the PSOE? I am asking you this because you

say that “the economy and kickbacks do not work without order, and the

partiocracy, if it is not exactly order, is a disorder that functions as

much to the benefit of the economy as to that of profits themselves. It

is established disorder”. By the way, do you vote?

MA: The modern State is a machine resting on a foundation of sand that

any crisis can destroy. In 1936, the republican State collapsed

overnight despite the fact that the fascist revolt was not as successful

as was anticipated. The coup attempt of 23F kept the State in a state of

suspense of days, which is how long it took to convince the military

high command and the royal house. Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland

have been on the verge of collapse because of such futile matters as

unpaid state debts, real estate bubbles or banking black holes. It is

precisely the fragility of the State that pushes the submissive and

alienated masses into the arms of the traditional parties, because they

are afraid that the remedies proposed by the new parties would affect

their personal routines and threaten that lifestyle that has cost them

so many unsatisfied desires and so much repressed will. Better an evil

you know than…. As for me, as the other Marx, Groucho, said, I would

never agree to join a club of voters that would admit me as a member,

which is why I have never voted.

JG: You say that indiscriminate terrorism plays a fundamental role for

the survival of our contemporary political and economic classes,

providing an alibi for introducing a police state. What is obvious to

you, is only a paranoid conspiracy to others. In any event, however, the

rise of Islamic terrorism, and the Islamic penetration into Europe, are

matters that give us a lot of food for thought in this sense. The

refugee “crisis”, for example: is it part of some plan?

MA: Joaquín Maurín, the founder of the POUM, said with respect to the

“white” terrorism that afflicted Barcelona between 1916 and 1924: “It is

an undeniable historical phenomenon that a class in power, when it feels

its enemy undermining the foundations of its power, resorts to

terrorism, whose forms vary according to circumstances.” Today we know

all about the “strategy of tension” in Italy during the seventies, to

which the panic-stricken Italian ruling class resorted to terrorism to

paralyze any inclinations the working class population may have had to

oppose the state by means other than the incorporation of the Italian

Stalinists into the government. A similar strategy, but on a lesser

scale, was applied in Spain between 1976 and 1981. The attacks and

kidnappings staged by FRAP and GRAPO, the extreme right and parallel

units of the police forces, were indications of an internal struggle

between the insiders from the Franco regime who favored modernization

and those who were more reluctant to dismantle the police-trade union

apparatus of the dictatorship. Jihadist terrorism, on the other hand,

was a direct consequence of the war that the capitalist countries are

waging in the Middle East and elsewhere for control over major reserves

of oil and gas. The abundance of failed States has given rise to the

emergence of an extremist party that has no qualms about making the

population of the West feel the deadly effects of the war in the Middle

East. What is ironic about this development is the fact that this party,

when it was first formed, was financed, armed and trained by the

capitalist States and their Islamic allies. The reactions to these

developments on the part of the middle classes in northern and southern

Europe have been quite different. While the southern Europeans interpret

the crisis and the war as domestic or foreign political problems, the

northern Europeans see them as security and border problems. While the

middle class of the Mediterranean countries likes to express a

humanitarianism that costs it nothing, in the rest of Europe that same

class contemplates the immigrants and refugees as a foreign body that is

very costly and that does not conform to its idiosyncrasies, which is

why there is so much support for a reactionary wave of ethnic identity

movements and nationalism is returning in its most proto-fascist forms.

JG: You express some very alarming, if not alarmist, reflections, with

respect to Progress, that incurable cancer: you have expressed the idea

that there is no future—which is to say that the Sex Pistols were right—

and that justice and freedom are increasingly less concrete, that there

are no beings with independent judgment but only people who are

unreflectively absorbed in their toys, that the only progress is that of

leaders who make progress thanks to the progress of ignorance,

submission and control. “If history follows the course laid out by

progressivist hubris, the endpoint will be desolation.” Is our outlook

so bleak?

MA: John Lydon recounts in his autobiography that the Pistols sang “no

future” precisely because they insisted that there should be one. Back

then, the United Kingdom was suffering the consequences of a prolonged

economic recession that was overcome with brutal austerity measures

during the Thatcher era and a dash of patriotism (the Malvinas War). It

was not a very lucid form of pessimism because it was still devoted to

progress, but it served as a rallying cry for the first frustrated

generation of recent history. It was more or less around that time that

the first issue of the Encyclopédie des Nuisances questioned the idea of

progress. Progress, understood as economic and technological growth, has

its negative side. This train has brought us wars, inequalities,

corruption, disease, pollution…. Developmentalism depletes resources,

destroys cultures, concentrates the population in insufferable

conurbations, creates pockets of marginalized people, ruins nature,

tortures the climate and throws the planet out of balance. Facing this

kind of panorama you cannot be an optimist. The evils brought to us by

the realization of the bourgeois concept of progress can be cured by

getting rid of it, which implies a social reorganization that is

incompatible with private profit and separate representation.

[1] His first single after his release from prison—translator’s note.

[2] “Even if it is not true, it is well conceived” [translator’s note].

[3] In English in the original—translator’s note.