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Title: Self-Destruction Author: CrimethInc. Date: December 17, 2011 Language: en Topics: suicide, Arab Spring, Tunisia Source: Retrieved on 9th November 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2011/12/17/self-destruction
It is December 17, 2011. One year ago today, Mohamed Bouazizi set
himself on fire in response to his mistreatment by the Tunisian police,
setting off a chain reaction worldwide. Let no one forget that the wave
of uprisings still sweeping the globe did not simply spring from the
hard work of activists, however long some labored to pave the way. It
did not begin with people setting out to better themselves or the world.
It began with the ultimate gesture of despair and self-destruction.
Bouazizi was not enacting a strategy. He was alone, as alone as a person
can be. By drawing back the curtain from injustice so we could come
together to fight it, he gave us a precious gift, but a costlier gift
than we have any right to receive. The European Parliament awarded him
the Sakharov Prize posthumously, but he died knowing only that he had
acted on his humiliation and rage, to no end other than to express them.
His death hangs in eternity as an irreparable tragedy. We might say the
same of so many others who have thrown away their lives in the history
of revolutionary struggle.
What can we learn, then, from this man who gave free vegetables to poor
families, who had to buy his wares on credit the way many of us must,
who reacted against the same policing that imposes inequalities in the
US? First, that misery is the same the world over today, even if it
assumes different forms. But we can go further: in Bouazizi’s example,
we see what it takes to get out of here, even if we do not wish to
ignite a worldwide conflagration but simply to change our own lives.
What would life be like after a revolution? The dishwasher pictures a
dishroom without a boss. The renter imagines herself in the same little
hovel, rent-free. The shopper looks forward to stores without checkout
counters. We can hardly imagine beyond this horizon—yet surely it would
be easier to change everything entirely than to build a version of this
world in which the same institutions and habits magically cease to be
oppressive. When what we are is intrinsically determined by capitalism,
it’s not enough to try to better ourselves; we have to cease to be
ourselves.
In the era of precarity, this is clearer than ever. Globalization has
swept the entire population of the planet into one labor pool that
competes for the same jobs; mechanization is replacing those jobs,
rendering us more and more disposable. In this context, those who set
out merely to defend their positions in the economy are doomed. Look at
the student movement of 2009–2010, or the protests in Wisconsin last
spring: these rearguard struggles to preserve the privileges of a
particular demographic could only fail. Today we can neither found our
strategy on incremental victories—we are in no more of a position to win
them than our rulers are to grant them—nor on the fixed roles that once
gave the general strike its force. We have to fight from our shared
vulnerability: not on the basis of what we are, but of what we will not
be.
The only thing that can bind us in this is our willingness to renounce,
to defect, to fight—to abolish the system that created us. This means
altering our lives beyond recognition. There are no guarantees in this
undertaking; it takes self-destructive abandon. We must not celebrate
this, but there is no getting around it.
Nothing is more terrifying than departing from what we know. It may take
more courage to do this without killing oneself than it does to light
oneself on fire. Such courage is easier to find in company; there is so
much we can do together that we cannot do as individuals. If he had been
able to participate in a powerful social movement, perhaps Bouazizi
would never have committed suicide; but paradoxically, for such a thing
to be possible, each of us has to take a step analogous to the one he
took into the void.
We cannot imagine what Bouazizi went through, nor the hundreds upon
hundreds of others who have lost their lives in the struggles throughout
North Africa since—only a minute fraction of the casualties of
capitalism this past year. Yet in embracing destruction on his own
terms, he at least opened a path to something else. When a youngster
hoods up for a black bloc or a middle-aged secretary moves into an
encampment, departing from all they know, all they have been, they can
hope to do the same.
Let’s make our despair into a transformative force. Perhaps we can give
a positive meaning to the saying that is so chilling in reference to the
gift Mohamed Bouazizi gave us: you have to be ready to die to be ready
to live.
“The transformed speaks only to relinquishers. All holders-on are
stranglers.” -Rainer Maria Rilke