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Title: Fighting in the New Terrain
Author: CrimethInc.
Date: August 24, 2010
Language: en
Topics: 21st century
Source: Retrieved on 9th November 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2010/08/24/fighting-in-the-new-terrain

CrimethInc.

Fighting in the New Terrain

Ten years ago we published Days of War, Nights of Love, one of the most

influential anarchist books of the turn of the century. Tremendous

technological and cultural shifts have occurred since then. On

reflection, it seems that many of the incidental changes radicals were

calling for have taken place, but none of the fundamental

transformations. We can learn a lot from studying how this happened and

what is different about today’s context.

Towards that end, we present the following analysis, the product of

months of discussion. We hope that this will inspire further analysis

and strategizing, and we invite you to share your feedback with us.

Overture: The More Things Change…

Once, the basic building block of patriarchy was the nuclear family, and

calling for its abolition was a radical demand. Now families are

increasingly fragmented—yet has this fundamentally expanded women’s

power or children’s autonomy?

Once, the mainstream media consisted of only a few television and radio

channels. These have not only multiplied into infinity but are being

supplanted by forms of media such as Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter. But

has this done away with passive consumption? And how much more control

over these formats do users really have, structurally speaking?

Once, movies represented the epitome of a society based on

spectatorship; today, video games let us star in our own shoot-‘em-up

epics, and the video game industry does as much business as Hollywood.

In an audience watching a movie, everyone is alone; the most you can do

is boo if the storyline outrages you. In the new video games, on the

other hand, you can interact with virtual versions of other players in

real time. But is this greater freedom? Is it more togetherness?

Once, one could speak of a social and cultural mainstream, and

subculture itself seemed subversive. Now “diversity” is at a premium for

our rulers, and subculture is an essential motor of consumer society:

the more identities, the more markets.

Once, people grew up in the same community as their parents and

grandparents, and travel could be considered a destabilizing force

interrupting static social and cultural configurations. Today life is

characterized by constant movement as people struggle to keep up with

the demands of the market; in place of repressive configurations, we

have permanent transience, universal atomization.

Once, laborers stayed at one workplace for years or decades, developing

the social ties and common reference points that made old-fashioned

unions possible. Today, employment is increasingly temporary and

precarious, as more and more workers shift from factories and unions to

service industry and compulsory flexibility.

Once, wage labor was a distinct sphere of life, and it was easy to

recognize and rebel against the ways our productive potential was

exploited. Now every aspect of existence is becoming “work,” in the

sense of activity that produces value in the capitalist economy:

glancing at one’s email account, one increases the capital of those who

sell advertisements. In place of distinct specialized roles in the

capitalist economy, we increasingly see flexible, collective production

of capital, much of which goes unpaid.

Once, the world was full of dictatorships in which power was clearly

wielded from above and could be contested as such. Now these are giving

way to democracies that seem to include more people in the political

process, thus legitimizing the repressive powers of the state.

Once, the essential unit of state power was the nation, and nations

competed among themselves to assert their individual interests. In the

era of capitalist globalization, the interests of state power transcend

national boundaries, and the dominant mode of conflict is not war but

policing. This is occasionally employed against rogue nations, but

continuously implemented against people.

Once, one could draw lines, however arbitrary, between the so-called

First World and Third World. Today the First World and the Third World

coexist in every metropolis, and white supremacy is administered in the

United States by an African-American president.

Fighting in the New Terrain

At the turn of the century, we could only imagine anarchism as a

desertion from an all-powerful social order.

Ten years ago, as starry-eyed young maniacs, we published Days of War,

Nights of Love, unexpectedly one of the best-selling anarchist books of

the following decade.[1] Although controversial at the time, in

retrospect it was fairly representative of what many anarchists were

calling for: immediacy, decentralization, do-it-yourself resistance to

capitalism. We added some more provocative elements: anonymity,

plagiarism, crime, hedonism, the refusal of work, the delegitimization

of history in favor of myth, the idea that revolutionary struggle could

be a romantic adventure.

Our approach was shaped by a specific historical context. The Soviet

bloc had recently collapsed and the impending political, economic, and

ecological crises had yet to come into view; capitalist triumphalism was

at its peak. We focused on undermining middle class values because they

seemed to define everyone’s aspirations; we presented anarchist struggle

as an individual project because it was difficult to imagine anything

else. As the anti-globalization movement gathered momentum in the US and

gave way to the anti-war movement, we came to conceptualize struggle

more collectively, though still as originating from a personal decision

to oppose a firmly rooted status quo.

Today, much of what we proclaimed has become passé. As capitalism has

shifted into a state of perpetual crisis and technological innovations

have penetrated deeper into every aspect of life, instability,

decentralization, and anonymity have come to characterize our society

without bringing the world of our dreams any closer.

Radicals often think they are out in a wasteland, disconnected from

society, when in fact they are its cutting edge—though not necessarily

moving towards the goals they espouse. As we later argued in Rolling

Thunder #5, resistance is the motor of history: it drives social,

political, and technological developments, forcing the prevailing order

to innovate constantly in order to outflank or absorb opposition. Thus

we can contribute to tremendous transformations without ever achieving

our object.

This is not to credit radicals with the agency to determine world

events, so much as to assert that we often find ourselves unconsciously

on their cusp. Measured against the infinities of history, all agency is

infinitesimal—but the very notion of political theory presumes that it

is still possible to utilize this agency meaningfully.

When we strategize for individual campaigns, we have to take care not to

make demands that can be defused by partial reforms, lest our oppressors

neutralize us by simply granting them. Some examples of easily co-opted

radical programs are so obvious that it is practically vulgar to point

them out: bicycle fetishism, “sustainable” technology, “buying local”

and other forms of ethical consumerism, volunteer work that mitigates

the suffering caused by global capitalism without challenging its roots.

But this phenomenon can also occur on a structural level. We should look

at the ways we have called for broad social change that could take place

without shaking the foundations of capitalism and hierarchy—so that next

time our efforts can take us all the way.

Today it must become a line of flight out of a collapsing world.

Not Working—Did It Work?

The defining provocation of our early years was to take literally the

Situationists’ dictum NEVER WORK. A few of us decided to test out on our

own skin whether this was actually possible. This bit of bravado showed

all the genius of untutored youth, and all the perils. Though countless

others had trodden this road before, for us it was as if we were the

first primates to be shot into space. In any case, we were doing

something, taking the dream of revolution seriously as a project one

might initiate in one’s own life immediately, with—as we used to say—an

aristocratic disdain for consequences.

It’s tempting to brush this off as mere performance art. Yet we have to

understand it as an early attempt to answer the question that still

faces would-be revolutionaries in the US and Western Europe: What could

interrupt our obedience? Contemporary insurrectionists are attempting to

ask this same question now, though the answers many of them offer are

equally limited. By themselves, neither voluntary unemployment nor

gratuitous vandalism seem to be capable of jerking society into a

revolutionary situation.[2] Despite everything, we stand by our initial

hunch that it will take a new way of living to bring about such a

situation; it’s not just a matter of putting in enough hours at the same

old tasks. The essential fabric of our society—the curtain that stands

between us and another world—is above all the good behavior of exploited

and excluded alike.

Within a decade, history rendered our experiment obsolete, perversely

granting our demand for an unemployable class. US unemployment rates,

alleged to be at 4% in the year 2000, had climbed to 10% by the end of

2009—only counting people known to be actively looking for work. The

excess of consumer society once offered dropouts a certain margin of

error; the economic crisis eroded this and gave a decidedly involuntary

flavor to joblessness.

It turns out capitalism has no more use for us than we have for it. This

doesn’t just go for anarchist dropouts, but for millions of workers in

the US. Despite the economic crisis, major corporations are currently

reporting enormous earnings—but instead of using this income to hire

more employees, they’re investing in foreign markets, purchasing new

technology to reduce their need for employees, and paying out dividends

to stockholders. What’s good for General Motors is not good for the

country after all;[3] the most profitable companies in the US right now

are shifting both production and consumption to “developing markets”

overseas.

In this context, dropout culture looks a bit like a voluntary austerity

program; it’s convenient for the wealthy if we reject consumer

materialism, since there’s not enough to go around anyway. In the late

20^(th) century, when the majority of people identified with their jobs,

refusing to pursue employment as self-realization expressed a rejection

of capitalist values. Now erratic employment and identification with

one’s leisure activities rather than one’s career path have been

normalized as an economic position rather than a political one.

Capitalism is also incorporating our assertion that people should act

according to their consciences instead of for a wage. In an economy full

of opportunities to sell one’s labor, it makes sense to emphasize the

importance of other motivations for activity; in a precarious economy,

being willing to work for free has different implications. The state

increasingly relies on the same do-it-yourself ethic that once animated

the punk underground to offset the deleterious effects of capitalism. It

is cheaper to let environmentalists volunteer to clean up the BP oil

spill than to pay employees to do this, for example. The same goes for

Food Not Bombs if it is treated as a charity program rather than a way

of establishing subversive flows of resources and camaraderie.

Today the challenge is not to persuade people to refuse to sell their

labor, but to demonstrate how a redundant class can survive and resist.

Unemployment we have in abundance—we need to interrupt the processes

that produce poverty.

New Technologies, Outmoded Strategies

In the second half of the 20^(th) century, radicals based themselves in

subcultural enclaves from which to launch assaults on mainstream

society. The call for confrontational unemployment presumed a context of

existing countercultural spaces in which people could invest themselves

in something else.

The cultural landscape is different today; subculture itself seems to

function differently. Thanks to new communications technology, it

develops and spreads much faster, and is replaced just as quickly. Punk

rock, for example, is no longer a secret society into which high school

students are initiated by classmates’ mix tapes. It is still generated

by the participants, but now as a consumer market mediated via

impersonal venues such as message boards and downloading. It’s no

surprise if people are less personally invested in it: as easily as they

discovered it, they can move on to something else. In a world composed

of information, subculture no longer appears to be outside society,

indicating a possible line of escape, but rather one of many zones

within it, a mere matter of taste.

Meanwhile, the internet has transformed anonymity from the province of

criminals and anarchists into a feature of everyday communication. Yet

unexpectedly, it also fixes political identities and positions in place

according to a new logic. The landscape of political discourse is mapped

in advance by URLs; it’s difficult to produce a mythology of collective

power and transformation when every statement is already located in a

known constellation. A poster on a wall could have been put up by

anyone; it seems to indicate a general sentiment, even if it only

represents one person’s ideas. A statement on a website, on the other

hand, appears in a world permanently segregated into ideological

ghettos. The myth of CrimethInc. as a decentralized underground anyone

could participate in inspired a great deal of activity until the

topography of the internet slowly concentrated attention on a single

webpage.

Thus the internet has simultaneously fulfilled and rendered obsolete the

potential we saw in subculture and anonymity. One could say the same of

our advocacy of plagiarism; a decade ago we thought we were taking an

extreme position against authorship and intellectual property when in

fact we were barely ahead of the curve. The weeks we spent combing

libraries for images to reuse foreshadowed a world in which practically

everyone does the same thing with Google Image Search for their blogs.

Conventional notions of authorship are being superseded by new forms of

production, such as crowdsourcing, that point to a possible future in

which free volunteer labor will be a major part of the economy—as a part

of capitalism rather than an opposition to it.

Here we arrive at one of the most pernicious ways our wishes have been

granted in form rather than content. Free distribution, once thought to

demonstrate a radical alternative to capitalist models, is now taken for

granted in a society in which the means of material production are still

held hostage by capitalists.[4] Electronic formats lend themselves to

free distribution of information; this forces those who produce material

formats such as newspapers to give them away, too, or go out of

business—to be replaced by bloggers happy to work for free. Meanwhile,

food, housing, and other necessities—not to mention the hardware

required to access electronic formats—are as expensive as ever. This

situation offers a certain amount of access to the dispossessed while

benefiting those who already control vast resources; it is perfect for

an era of high unemployment in which it will be necessary to placate the

jobless and make use of them. It implies a future in which a wealthy

elite will use free labor from a vast body of precarious and unemployed

workers to maintain its power and their dependence.

This is all the more gruesome in that this free labor will be absolutely

voluntary, and will appear to benefit the general public rather than the

elite.

Perhaps the central contradiction of our age is that the new

technologies and social forms horizontalize production and distribution

of information, yet make us more dependent on corporate products.

Decentralizing Hierarchy: Participation as Subjugation

At the close of the 1990s, anarchists championed participation,

decentralization, and individual agency. Building on our experiences in

the do-it-yourself underground, we helped popularize the viral model, in

which a format developed in one context could be reproduced worldwide.

Exemplified by programs like Food Not Bombs and tactics such as the

Black Bloc, this helped spread a particular anti-authoritarian culture

from New York to New Zealand.

At the time, we were responding both to the limitations of the previous

century’s political and technological models and to emerging

opportunities to transcend them. This put us near the forefront of

innovations that reshaped capitalist society. For example, TXTmob, the

SMS text messaging program developed by the Institute for Applied

Autonomy for protests at the Democratic and Republican National

Conventions, served as a model for Twitter. Similarly, one can interpret

the networks of the international do-it-yourself underground, formalized

in guidebooks like Book Your Own Fucking Life, as forerunners of Myspace

and Facebook. Meanwhile, the viral model is now best known for viral

marketing.

So consumer culture has caught up to us, integrating our escape attempt

into the maintenance of the spectacle we rejected and offering everyone

else the opportunity to “escape” as well. Bored by unidirectional

network television programming, the modern consumer can do her own

programming, albeit still at a physical and emotional distance from her

fellow viewers. Our longings for more agency and participation have been

granted, but inside a framework still fundamentally determined by

capitalism. The demand that everyone become a subject rather than an

object has been realized: now we are the subjects administering our own

alienation, fulfilling the Situationist dictum that the spectacle is not

just the world of appearances but rather the social system in which

human beings only interact as their prescribed roles.[5]

Even fascists are trying to get in on decentralization and autonomy. In

Europe, “Autonomous Nationalists” have appropriated radical aesthetics

and formats, utilizing anticapitalist rhetoric and black bloc tactics.

This is not simply a matter of our enemies attempting to disguise

themselves as us, though it certainly muddies the waters: it also

indicates an ideological split in fascist circles as the younger

generation attempts to update its organizational models for the 21^(st)

century. Fascists in the US and elsewhere are engaged in the same

project under the paradoxical banner of “National Anarchism”; if they

succeed in persuading the general public that anarchism is a form of

fascism, our prospects will be bleak indeed.

What does it mean if fascists, the foremost proponents of hierarchy, can

employ the decentralized structures we pioneered? The 20^(th) century

taught us the consequences of using hierarchical means to pursue

supposedly non-hierarchical ends. The 21^(st) century may show us how

supposedly non-hierarchical means can produce hierarchical ends.

Extrapolating from these developments and others, we might hypothesize

that we are moving towards a situation in which the foundation of

hierarchical society will not be permanent centralization of power, but

the standardization of certain disempowering forms of socializing,

decision-making, and values. These appear to spread spontaneously,

though in fact they only appear desirable because of what is absent in

the social context imposed on us.

But—decentralized hierarchies? This sounds like a Zen koan. Hierarchy is

the concentration of power in the hands of a few. How can it be

decentralized?

To make sense of this, let’s go back to Foucault’s conception of the

panopticon. Jeremy Bentham designed the panopticon as a model to make

prisons and workplaces more efficient; it is a circular building in

which all the rooms open inward on a courtyard, so as to be viewed from

a central observation tower. The inmates cannot see what goes on in the

tower, but they know they may be under observation from it at any given

moment, so they eventually internalize this surveillance and control. In

a word, power sees without looking, while the observed look without

seeing.

In the panopticon, power is already based in the periphery rather than

the center, in that control is chiefly maintained by the inmates

themselves.[6] Workers compete to be capitalists rather than

establishing common cause as a class; fascists enforce oppressive

relationships autonomously, without state oversight. Domination is not

imposed from above but is a function of participation itself.

Simply to participate in society, we must accept the mediation of

structures determined by forces outside our control. For example, our

friendships increasingly pass through Facebook, cellular phones, and

other technologies that map our activities and relationships for

corporations as well as government intelligence; these formats also

shape the content of the friendships themselves. The same goes for our

economic activities: in place of simple poverty we have loans and credit

ratings—we are not a class without property, but a class driven by debt.

And once again, all this appears voluntary, or even as “progress.”

What does it look like to resist in this context? Everything seemed so

much easier in 1917 when proletarians worldwide dreamed of storming the

Winter Palace. Two generations later, the equivalent seemed to be taking

over the headquarters of network television; this fantasy reappeared in

a Hollywood action movie as recently as 2005. Now, it’s increasingly

obvious that global capitalism has no center, no heart through which to

drive a stake.

In fact, this development is a boon to anarchists, in that it closes the

way to top-down forms of struggle. There are no shortcuts now, and no

justifications for taking them—there will be no more “provisional”

dictatorships. The authoritarian revolutions of the 20^(th) century are

behind us for good; if revolt is to break out, anarchist practices will

have to spread.

Some have argued that in the absence of a center, when the

aforementioned virus is much more dangerous than the frontal assault,

the task is not so much to pick the correct target as to popularize a

new way of fighting. If this has not yet occurred, maybe it is simply

because anarchists have yet to develop an approach that strikes others

as practical. When we demonstrate concrete solutions to the problems

posed by the capitalist disaster, perhaps these will catch on.

But this is tricky. Such solutions have to resonate beyond any

particular subculture in an era in which every innovation instantly

generates and is contained by subculture. They must somehow refuse and

interrupt the forms of participation essential to the maintenance of

order, both the ones predicated on integration and the ones predicated

on marginality. They have to provide for people’s immediate needs while

giving rise to insurgent desires leading elsewhere. And if we advance

solutions that turn out not to address the root causes of our

problems—as we did a decade ago—we will only inoculate the ruling order

against this generation’s resistance.

When it comes to contagious solutions, perhaps the Greek riots of 2008

during which all the banks were burned were less significant than the

day-to-day practices in Greece of occupying buildings, seizing and

redistributing food, and gathering publicly outside the logic of

commerce. Or perhaps the riots were equally significant: not just as a

material attack on the enemy but as a festival affirming a radically

different way of being.

Destabilization of Society: Double or Nothing

In the 1990s, capitalism appeared eminently stable, if not unassailable.

Anarchists fantasized about riots, catastrophes, and industrial collapse

precisely because these seemed impossible—and because, in their absence,

it appeared that they could only be a good thing.

All that changed starting in September 2001. A decade later, crises and

catastrophes are all too familiar. The notion that the world is coming

to an end is practically banal; who hasn’t read a report about global

warming and shrugged? The capitalist empire is obviously overextended

and few still believe it is going to last forever. For now, however, it

seems to be able to utilize these catastrophes to consolidate control,

passing on the costs to the oppressed.[7]

As globalization intensifies the distance between classes, some of the

disparities between nations seem to be leveling out. Social support

structures in Europe and the US are being dismantled just as economic

growth shifts to China and India; National Guardsmen who served in Iraq

are being deployed in the US to maintain order during summit protests

and natural disasters. This is consistent with the general trend away

from static, spatialized hierarchies towards dynamic, decentralized

means of maintaining inequalities. In this new context, 20^(th) century

notions about privilege and identity are increasingly simplistic.

Our enemies to the Right have already mobilized their reaction to the

era of globalization and decentralization. We can see this from the Tea

Party in the US to nationalist movements throughout Europe and religious

fundamentalism worldwide. While Western Europe has agglomerated into the

European Union, Eastern Europe has been Balkanized into dozens of

nation-states teeming with fascists eager to capitalize on popular

discontent. Religious fundamentalism is a comparatively recent

phenomenon in the Middle East, having taken hold in the wake of failed

secular “national liberation” movements as an exaggerated reaction to

Western cultural imperialism. If we permit proponents of hierarchy to

monopolize opposition to the prevailing order, anarchists will simply

disappear from the stage of history.

Others are already disappearing from this stage. As the middle class

erodes in Europe,[8] traditional Left parties are dying out with it, and

far Right parties are taking all the ground they lose.

If the Left continues to recede into extinction, anarchism will be the

only game left in town for radicals.[9] This will open a space in which

we can make our case to all who have lost faith in political parties.

But are we prepared to fight it out with global capitalism on our own,

without allies? Escalating conflict is a gamble: as soon as we attract

the attention of the state, we have to play double or nothing,

attempting to mobilize enough popular support to outflank the inevitable

counterattack. Every riot has to be followed by an even broader outreach

campaign, not a retreat into the shadows—a tall order in the face of

backlash and repression.

Perhaps it would be better if history were moving slowly enough that we

had time to build up a massive popular movement. Unfortunately we may

not have a choice in the matter. Ready or not, the instability we wished

for is here; we will either change the world or perish with it.

So it is high time to dispense with strategies founded on the stasis of

the status quo. At the same time, crisis keeps one locked in a perpetual

present, reacting to constant stimuli rather than acting strategically.

At our current capacity, we can do little to mitigate the effects of

capitalist catastrophes. Our job is rather to set off chain reactions of

revolt; we should evaluate everything we undertake in this light.

In this context, it is more important than ever not to see ourselves as

the protagonists of insurrection. The currently existing social body of

anarchists in the US is numerous enough to catalyze social upheavals,

but not nearly numerous enough to carry them out. As a comrade from Void

Network never tires of emphasizing, “We don’t make the insurrection. We

do some organizing; everyone makes the insurrection.”

This will demand a lot from each of us. Ten thousand anarchists willing

to go to the same lengths as Enric Duran, the patron saint of debt

defaulters, could constitute a real force, seizing resources with which

to establish alternative infrastructures and setting a public example of

disobedience that could spread far and wide.[10] That would bring

“dropping out” up to date for the new era. It’s terrifying to imagine

going to such lengths—but in a collapsing world, terror waits ahead

whether we choose it or not.

Everyone who has participated in a black bloc knows it’s safest in the

front. Double or nothing.

Conclusion: Forbidden Pleasures

But enough about strategy. There was one demand in Days of War, Nights

of Love that could not be realized in any form under capitalism: the

idea that unmediated life could become intense and joyous. We expressed

this in our conception of resistance as a romantic adventure capable of

fulfilling all the desires produced but never consummated by consumer

society. Despite all the tribulation and heartbreak of the past decade,

this challenge still lingers like hope at the bottom of Pandora’s box.

We still stand by this demand. We don’t resist simply out of duty or

habit or thirst for vengeance, but because we want to live fully, to

make the most of our limitless potential. We are anarchist

revolutionaries because it seems there is no way to find out what that

means without at least a little fighting.

As many hardships as it may entail, our struggle is a pursuit of joy—to

be more precise, it is a way of generating new forms of joy. If we lose

sight of this, no one else will join us, nor should they. Enjoying

ourselves is not simply something we must do to be strategic, to win

recruits; it is an infallible indication of whether or not we have

anything to offer.

As austerity becomes the watchword of our rulers, the pleasures

available on the market will be increasingly ersatz. The turn to virtual

reality is practically an admission that real life is not—cannot

be—fulfilling. We should prove otherwise, discovering forbidden

pleasures that point the way to another world.

Ironically, ten years ago this one sensible demand was the most

controversial aspect of our program. Nothing makes people more defensive

than the suggestion that they can and should enjoy themselves: this

triggers all their shame at their failures to do so, all their

resentment towards those they feel must be monopolizing pleasure, and a

great deal of lingering Puritanism besides.

In Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, David Graeber speculates that

If one wishes to inspire ethnic hatred, the easiest way to do so is to

concentrate on the bizarre, perverse ways in which the other group is

assumed to pursue pleasure. If one wishes to emphasize commonality, the

easiest way is to point out that they also feel pain.

This formula is tragically familiar to anyone who has witnessed radicals

caricaturing each other. Declaring that you have experienced heavenly

pleasure—especially in something that actually violates the regime of

control, such as shoplifting or fighting police—is an invitation for

others to heap scorn upon you. And perhaps this formula also explains

why anarchists can come together when the state murders Brad Will or

Alexis Grigoropoulos but cannot set aside our differences to fight

equally fiercely for the living.

Death mobilizes us, catalyzes us. The reminder of our own mortality

liberates us, enabling us to act without fear—for nothing is more

terrifying than the possibility that we could live out our dreams, that

something is truly at stake in our lives. If only we knew that the world

were ending, we would finally be able to risk everything—not just

because we would have nothing to lose, but because we would no longer

have anything to win.

But if we want to be anarchists, we are going to have to embrace the

possibility that our dreams can come true—and fight accordingly. We are

going to have to choose life over death for once, pleasure over pain. We

are going to have to begin.

[1] At the time, we had no idea the book would reach anyone at all. A

fierce argument took place shortly before it went to print over whether

to print 1000 or 1500 copies, which concluded with one CrimethInc. agent

declaring that he would pay for the extra 500 copies himself and give

them away. Instead, we went through fourteen printings over the next ten

years; as of this writing, well over 55,000 print copies are in

circulation, not counting the various translations.

[2] To be fair, the insurrectionist mantra of attack is more up to date

than our boycott of wage labor. The latter presumed that the economy

requires our participation; the former accepts that it does not, and

focuses on interrupting it by other means.

[3] This is even more sticking in light of the fact that General Motors

is now predominantly owned by the US government

[4] In the mid-1990s, the most radical do-it-yourself bands fantasized

about being able to give away their records as a political statement;

now every band practically has to give away their music just to get

started. While it appears at first glance that music is being

decommodified, in fact musicians are being compelled to provide free

labor that reinforces consumer dependence on new commodities such as

computers and smartphones. Benefit records used to be able to raise

significant quantities of money for political prisoners and other causes

outside the logic of the exchange economy; today this is much more

difficult. Thus free distribution can serve to concentrate capital in

the hands of capitalists, undercutting the resistance strategies of the

previous generation.

[5] “The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social

relation between people that is mediated by images.” –Guy Debord,

Society of the Spectacle

[6] The inmate of the panopticon “assumes responsibility for the

constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he

inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays

both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.” –Michel

Foucault, Discipline and Punish

[7] Let us not forget that from 1945 to 1989 capitalism thrived by

exploiting another ongoing catastrophe, the Cold War, in which a series

of conflicts and crises threatened to end in nuclear Armageddon.

Instability and the specter of the end of the world can be very useful

to our rulers. We can imagine a future in which the repressive measures

necessary to maintain industrial capitalism are justified on ecological

grounds the same way that a generation ago the repressive measures

necessary to maintain the democracy of the market were justified as

protecting freedom.

[8] Contrary to its mythology, the Left exists to defend the interests

of the middle class, not the poor. The welfare programs of social

democracy were established to appease the oppressed instead of granting

them an equal say in society. Likewise, “sustainable”

capitalism—tellingly, the latest cause to reinvigorate the Left—is more

about sustaining capitalism than sustaining life on earth.

[9] Of course, if anarchists become more effective, we will probably see

Leftist organizing revive, in part as a means of co-opting resistance.

[10] Now that God is dead, perhaps we can disbelieve debt out of

existence—or even money, if enough of us treat it as a fiction.