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Title: Capitalism, Therefore Crisis Author: Miguel AmorĂłs Date: October 6, 2012 Language: en Topics: culture, crisis, technology Source: Retrieved on 8th May 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/capitalism-therefore-crisis-miguel-amor%C3%B3s Notes: Notes for a talk/debate at the Jornadas Libertarias de CastellĂłn, October 6, 2012. Translated in November 2013 from a copy of the Spanish original provided by the author.
“Life is short, and Art long; the crisis fleeting; experience perilous,
and decision difficult.”
Hippocrates, Aphorisms
For Hippocrates the word “crisis” designated the culminating point of an
illness, on the basis of which, after a thorough examination of the
symptomatic data and taking into account the evidence, he could
establish a criterion with which to make his diagnosis. The end point of
critical reasoning, the correct diagnosis, is not easy, since not all
the factors may be evident at the same time and often one illness will
conceal another. If we apply this reflection to our current situation we
find ourselves facing an apparently economic crisis that provokes
immediate reactions, affecting the skin, guided by a tactical point of
view that remains on the terrain of parliamentarism and capital. The
crisis is inherent to the capitalist regime, since its normal
functioning consists in the constant subversion of the social relations
upon which it had previously been based. Each stage liquidates the
previous one, and therefore one cannot confront the crisis without
directly attacking capitalism, but the responses that have traditionally
arisen address its consequences rather than its causes. They do not
question the foundations of the system but only complain about its
malfunction. Protests decry the loss of the “welfare state”, that is,
the decline of the wage level of the masses of consumers, and in
addition, the decline of employment and credit; the low quality of
public services, social assistance and the party system, the greed of
the bankers, and to top it all off, the dictatorship of international
finance which is imposed on the majority of the population thanks to the
mediation of the politicians. It therefore appears that they can allow
solutions within the framework of the dominant economic and political
system, by way of legislative and executive measures that would reduce
the critical impact on the masses of wage workers and indebted
consumers, thus preventing the phenomena of exclusion. The solution must
therefore come from the hands of an interventionist state rather than by
way of its abolition. Capitalism will have to undergo yet more
development in order to create enough low-paying jobs instead of
disappearing. As is the case in Medicine, however, here, too, a
superficial crisis can dissimulate other more profound and less visible
ones.
The crisis is political, it is urban and it is also ecological. It is
the culminating point of a social and cultural illness whose symptoms
are undeniable: loss of memory, dissolution of classes, individualism,
narcissism, degradation of language, functional illiteracy, fear,
domestication … and the resulting human type itself explains the lack of
popular reaction to this crisis. It is the conjunction where the
political class monopolizes all the public institutions and becomes
fully autonomous, defending its own interests as part of the ruling
class. At the very moment that urban growth accumulates millions of
impoverished people in the fringes of the big cities while
simultaneously annihilating the rural and natural environment, we are
becoming aware of the depletion of natural resources in the face of an
unlimited demand for them. And when the circumstance of global warming
of the planet arises as a response to the pollution of the atmosphere by
greenhouse gases. But the real and complete understanding of the crisis
leads to a second level of questioning. Then critique is directed at the
nature of the system and does not settle for band-aids or reforms.
Conscious individuals have to reconsider the way of life that they would
like to lead, the organization of their time and space, the model of
society they have to live in and, finally, that society’s metabolic
equilibrium with nature, in order to elaborate a comprehensive,
long-term strategy of collective intervention. They have to question the
system in its entirety and not just its most degrading aspects.
The question of the subject occupies the central place in critical
thought. The radical transformation of society requires a social agent
to carry it out, one that must necessarily be born from the accession to
consciousness of the people who are most affected by the crisis. The
problem lies in the fact that this subject cannot be constituted within
a totalitarian system, one in which domination penetrates and seizes all
aspects of life. This subject must be formed by means of desertion or
exclusion. The processes of secession are slow, because they depend on
personal decisions under difficult circumstances; they are problematic,
because the system does not favor life on the margins; and they are
susceptible to deviations from their goals, since they tend to
overemphasize one aspect of their secession, cooperation, to the
detriment of the other, the struggle, which is why their anti-capitalism
is often sidetracked towards experimentation within capitalism. On the
other hand, however, involuntary exclusion, often enclosed in the urban
periphery, imprisoned in areas that have been abandoned by the system,
responds to the economic violence causes it with a violence under the
opposite sign, but the vandalism of the excluded is not an attempt to
change the world, but forms a part of this world. Desertion is also a
cultural phenomenon, but total deracination prevents the street gangs of
looters from constructing a free community, even one based on predation,
such as were constituted, in another time, by the associations of
corsairs: all they have is rap music and what they need is an authentic
culture of exclusion. So far, only those communities that have resisted
the social relations of the market, the indigenous populations not
engulfed by the way of life imposed by capital, have been able to forge
a social subject capable of elaborating a project of social
transformation, by extending their communitarian structures both into
the adjacent rural areas as well as the urban neighborhoods. The best
example of what we are talking about is the 2006 Commune of Oaxaca.
One thing that is clear is that the collective protagonist of the
solution of the crisis will arise from communities of neighbors, not
from organizations of the vanguard, trade unions or councils. Such
communities are not necessarily the result of an exodus to the
countryside, since anti-capitalist secession can also take place within
the conurbation. Indeed, given the current state of the population, the
outbreak of hostilities will necessarily take place in the decomposing
urban areas. It is in the urban areas where the masses have to “take to
the hills”. The rural advance parties can open up the way forward, but
the crisis will really break out only when the conurbation explodes,
which will take place, for example, if the lack of fuel causes supply
problems. The inevitable energy crisis, by paralyzing transport, will
lead to successive food crises with disastrous consequences for survival
in the metropolis. In the highly developed capitalist countries where
there are no virgin zones where a community could survive and radiate
its influence towards the urban space, the territorial conflict in the
rural areas could very well play the role of catalyst of this community,
but the largest number of participants will come from the masses
confined in the cities. Furthermore, the urban struggle can make sense
if it is also engaged in the defense of territory. De-urbanization will
follow the same road as urbanization.
The processes of ruralization will at first have to engender mixed
communities in a double sense: agrarian and urban, on the one hand; and
communities engaged in the labor of creation and that of struggle, on
the other. The most important battle that has to be won is the one that
is being waged already against progressivist ideologies and the staunch
defenders of the continuing development of the productive forces. This
battle is being fought for the most part on the terrain of the critique
of science and technology, that is, on the terrain of the critique of
the dominant industrial culture, because the disintegration of this
culture of growth, of consumption and of progress, without use value,
must give birth to a counterculture of fraternity and the gift, without
exchange value. This counterculture must not exist as a sphere that is
separate from the rest of the communitarian activities, but as an
internal space of free creation involved in the anti-industrial
transformation of society. For this reason it will be more similar to
the old popular culture than to the classical culture of the elites, and
will be more oral than written, for, in homage to the liberating
experiences of the past, this culture will be created in order to be
spoken, not to be read or “audio-visualized”. Oralization is the
cultural counterpart of de-industrialization, just as dialectization is
the abandonment of the standardizing techno-culture of late capitalism.
The local dialects spoken in the communitarian spaces will replace the
specialized jargons of the virtualized spaces of power. The future
revolution—a revolution is nothing but the end of a crisis—will
encounter its adequate means of expression in the argot of those who
fight for freedom.
The current crisis, the threshold of a depression in every sense of the
word, introduces us to a scenario of profound change and traumatic
rupture, where it is impossible to reverse course. The consequences will
be of momentous importance. Society, as the kingdom of the irrational
and the arbitrary—as the domain of the spectacle—has become too unstable
and too unreal. The necessary conflicts will return the world to
reality, but it will be a warlike reality. The social struggle, like
war, only unfolds in the realm of risk; it breathes an atmosphere of
danger. Its development is unforeseeable: it might immerse us again in
the worst nightmare or it might just get us out of this mess. Victory is
never certain but the crisis is a factor in its favor. It shows us the
vulnerable points of the enemy, the points where it is feasible to
attack with guarantees of success.