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Title: The Xtended Release Manifesto Date: 11/06/2018 Authors: Xtended Release Topics: Riots, Revolution, Music, Raves, Party, Dance music
“House isn't so much a sound as a situation”
-DJ Sprinkles, Midtown 120 Blues
What we would like to emphasize first and foremost is our absolute adoration of mankind, a being who we hold to be fundamentally innocent, responsible, amicable, and just. Free of all external factors, humanity is a cooperative, social species. Our ability to get along, and our capacity for love, is our greatest source of power. Throughout history, we see that every injustice perpetrated, from the scale of spectacular, catastrophic wars to every interpersonal act of ill will, to be the result of external factors inhibiting our ability to cooperate, to understand, and to love.
Such is the intensity of our love for humanity that we fail to even articulate our dismay at what it has allowed to happen to humanity. But what external factors could possibly account for what appears to be an inherent wickedness of humankind? Simply put, the material conditions of our lives, and the forces that control these conditions, and structures that give power to those forces, are the roots of what we consider to be the human experience. That is not to say that you are what you own, but that the quality of your life is determined by what is available to you. A society where any one person finds that healthcare is unavailable is a failed society. A society where any individual finds that free expression is not possible is a failed society. A society where anybody finds that an expectation to live, and not be killed, enslaved, or otherwise have their agency violated unrealistic is a failed society. We base all these assumptions on the premise that all humans, by virtue of how good they fundamentally, naturally are, deserve better than to suffer as they do under the structures that currently exist. Furthermore, we find that these structures are, at their most base level, predicated on illegitimate hierarchies and fundamental misunderstandings of the nature of human beings, nature, and reality.
Reformation of these structures accomplishes nothing. Power prefers darkness, so they must be uprooted, held to the light, and expunged from our collective reality. We are declaring war, on the grounds of self defense, against all forms of illegitimate hierarchy. Our weapons will manifest from our ability to love, to cooperate, and to understand one another, our resolve from our inability to be anything but unapologetically human. We hold true that the one thing capable of freeing humanity from the inhumanity of the superstructure is our unification against it. The best possible reality for any one of us is one in which every single one of us is experiencing their best possible reality.
The most fundamental principle of being a DJ is being attuned to the reality of the dancefloor, and in turn the multitude of realities that shape that reality. In other words, we have to pay attention to the dancefloor, and consider what factors make the dancefloor the way that it is. To internalize and reflect the situation presented to us, both the situation that is immediately apparent to us and the general situation that dictates the terms under which we construct our own internal realities, that is each of our unique states of mind that serves as a filter between what we understand to be real and the unknowable real. To take an active role in the interplay between content, context, situations, and the construction of reality is at the core of the role of the DJ, music just happens to be the vehicle by which we are able to participate.
But what is our situation? To put it bluntly, we are staring down the barrel of oblivion and idly waiting for something to pull the trigger. The forces of empire of capital are stronger now than ever before in the history of humanity. Industry itself is on the verge of technological breakthroughs that will irrevocably change the nature of production forever. Wealth continues to flow upward where it is locked out of access of the general population of the world. It might be too late to do anything substantial to counteract human-made climate change. As a harbinger to how critical our moment is and how bleak the future might be, western democracies are bearing witness to a full-fledged resurgence of fascism, an ideology created and solely made possible by the systemic failure of capitalism.
We fear that the only thing left to fight for is the epilogue of the human experience. We fear that we have run out of time to be anything but absolutely radical in everything we do. To remain passive is to assume defeat and accept complete annihilation. We have no intention of doing so. It’s time to get going.
Within the rave and the riot exists a concurrent phenomenon in which unarticulated angst manifests as the hysterical, kinetic body. This angst stems from every aspect of our lives that are toxic to us that are the result of capitalism, and the social power dynamics and exploitation that results thereof. This angst is so toxic to us particularly because we have no means to redress it, or even process it for that matter, due to the fact that the only way to adequately process these feelings is to accept that the reality we accept is illegitimate, the values we are taught to hold true are forfeit, and that a reality that is a radical departure from the one we take for granted is as possible as things continuing on the same path forever (or at least as long as it can). This capacity to envision alternate realities is the basis of radical thought.
One of the many heads that constitutes the hydra that is our collective angst is the knowledge that, under the structures of government, elections, and constitutions we live under, we have no legitimate course of action to enact any substantial political change. The powers that be are smart enough to codify the means by which we as the general populace are allowed to participate in the course of government so that they are completely ineffectual to do what we need to be done. Only in moments when the veneer of peace and order cracks do we see the natural process by which inarticulate angst is converted into radical energy in a hysteric, kinetic, populist explosion of fury and passion; the riot. In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,
Riots, however, are but disparate example of groups of people simultaneously reaching their breaking points in response to an extreme stimuli and demonstrating their rage in a self-organized flash of violence and disruption. In a way, they are a glass cannon. In our situation, riots barely affect any substantial, lasting impact beyond the physical destruction left behind and the implicit threat that it might happen again. With the pace that mass media barrels along at nowadays, even the memory of such events fades almost completely in the span of weeks. The riot, for all its direct, tangible impact, fails to allocate any of its energy into curating and maintaining a sustainable movement, and they generally burn out as fast as they flare up.
The rave is another avenue for us to manifest this angst in the form of the hysteric, kinetic body the similarity between how the rioter gesticulates in the crowd in the streets and how the raver contorts themself on the dancefloor are strikingly similar. In fact, it is not uncommon to see rioters break into massive, spontaneous dances and chant at the same regular intervals that dance music is structurally based on. We don’t think this is a coincidence. Both the riot and the rave serve the same function, to give people the opportunity to convert angst, an unspoken rage, into radical energy. The difference between them is where this energy is directed; in the case of the riot, an unsustainable explosion of externalized violence. In the case of the rave, conjured but failed to be utilized due to a lack of clear and explicit intent. The rave’s capacity for radical organization is validated by the fixation of empire’s forces on the recuperation of the rave phenomenon by commodifying it in the form of major EDM festivals, where the energy is completely obfuscated and perverted into absolute engrossment of the spectacle.
Our intent is to utilize this limit-experience to organize and energize a robust leftist presence in Los Angeles.
“The House Nation likes to pretend clubs are an oasis from suffering, but suffering is in here, with us”
-DJ Sprinkles, Midtown 120 Blues
Understanding the reality of the dancefloor as a space where suffering is not escaped from, but where it is actually confronted, is crucial to understanding its role as a means for people to confront and internalize feelings and experiences where conventional means fail us. This reality also illuminates the importance the context of a rave is to the rave itself. Raves do not exist merely due to an unaddressed demand for this type of event, but specifically because they are illegal, underground, unsanctioned, and radical, conditions that can only exist in opposition to a status quo. In this sense, raves exist primarily as a reaction to the status quo, and therefore it can be inferred that the function of the rave is to subvert the status quo. Assuming the status quo relies on the passivity of those that live under it, then the function of the rave must be to engender radical energy in those that attend or participate. The process by which the rave achieves this is by converting angst by way of the hysterical body. The moment this conversion takes place is akin to what Foucault called a limit-experience.
"The point of life which lies as close as possible to the impossibility of living, which lies at the limit or the extreme.”
That is to say an experience that brings you to the far edge of comprehension, a moment that allows you to perceive reality beyond the false values that construct our general concept of reality. The moment we embrace the absurd, a moment without which radical thought is impossible.
The potential of this limit-experience can be laid to waste all too easily by refusing to engage with the political reality of the situation and ascribing completely to hedonism. To regard the dancefloor as a space to escape, to forget, to chase euphoria. We’ve had enough fun. It’s time to act.
We would be remiss to not explicitly acknowledge the revolutionary, subversive cultural landscape we have decided engage with. That is to say everything we might hope to accomplish is built on a foundation established by Black, Latinx, and queer peoples, from the Harlem ballrooms to the destitute auto factories of Detroit. Not just the techno music that they are the progenitors for, but for imbuing it with the political scope and intent that has always been an integral aspect of the club. Even beyond whatever sort of debt we owe these progenitors, the basis of our political thought is founded on the empowerment, validation, and protection of all identifications of gender, race, ethnicity, and class. However, in response to the situation we find ourselves in, we find it absolutely necessary to give disproportionate platform and visibility to the expression of PoC, gendernoncomforming, non-heteronormative, and poor peoples participating in our scene, so as to better proportion their presence in the grand scope of society’s collective consciousness. Healing does not begin once the assailant ceases to stab the victim, but once the blade is removed and medical attention is applied to the wound. As such, there will be absolutely zero tolerance for bigoted, hateful, or prejudiced actions or rhetoric in whatever space we occupy. Displays of domination, harassment, manipulation, or otherwise any action that violates the agency of another human is absolutely condemned and prohibited. This includes the endorsement of any political ideology, rhetoric, or candidate that contributes to the proliferation of any of the aforementioned ills. Reactionaries need not participate at any capacity.
It is these core beliefs that we predicate our values on. However, we also understand the need to translate principled belief into practical action. At this juncture, we would like to extinguish any ambiguity in what we stand for in the context of our immediate, political situation. Following is a non-exhaustive list of examples of positions we take in adherence with our core beliefs. Mixed in with immediate political projects are categorical calls for systemic changes, treating symptoms as well as focusing on the core disease. Not to be categorized as a list of demands, because we make no demands. We ask for nothing. We will take, occupy.
- Universal Basic Income
- Comprehensive labor organization
- Establishment of worker cooperatives
- Universal Healthcare
- State funded tuition
- End to corporate welfare
- Abolition of the IMF
- Abolition of tax exempt status for religious institutions
- Establishment of steeply graduated income tax, capital gains, & luxury tax
- Limit maximum income to 10 times minimum income
- Establishment of vacancy tax
- Universal rent control
- Reappropriation of defense funding to infrastructure and social programs
- Dismantling and regulation of the military and prison industrial complexes
- Abolition of privatized prisons
- Inheritance tax reform
- End to extreme wealth
- Tax on Wall Street speculators
- Make impossible the utility of offshore tax havens
- Repeal NAFTA, CAFTA, and PNTR
- Expansion of Social Security
- Break up major financial institutions
- Abolition of copyright
- Establishment of the internet as a public utility
- Abolition of the electoral college
- Polling reform (aggregate polling)
- Comprehensive prison reform/ abolition
- Comprehensive police reform/ abolition
- Abolition of death penalty
- Full voting rights to felons
- Abolition of voter ID laws
- Establishment of automatic voter registration
- Full voting rights to US territories
- Decriminalization of all drug offences
- End to “War on Drugs”
- Establishment of Election Day as national holiday
- Expansion of early voter/ mail-in ballot programs
- Overturn Citizens United
- Enforce complete transparency of campaign finance
- Allow for independent election overview/ review
- Abolition of Super PACs
- Payment of reparations to black americans
- Payment of reparations and cession of land to Native Americans
- Free public transportation
- Reform of transportation paradigm from “automobility” to “accessibility”
- Abolition of civil forfeiture
- Amnesty for all immigrants
- Paternal leave for both parents
- Abolition of the ICE
- Immediate end of arms sales to Saudi Arabia and Israel
- Recognition of Palestine as a state
- Ethical trade regulation
- End of utilization of exploited foreign labor
- Immediate closure of extrajudicial military prison camps i.e. CIA “black sites”
- End to industrial agriculture
- Implementation of sustainable farming/ fishing practices
- Recognition of rights of non-human animals
- Public ownership of all natural resources
At this juncture, we would like to broaden the scope of discussion and address what we hold to be the single most pressing matter at hand, and what will be the defining struggle of the human experience for the foreseeable future. At this moment, we are beyond the point of no return and must rethink human existence in the context of its inevitable reckoning, a situation brought on by our collective reluctance to address or reconcile with exactly how dire our situation is in relation to climate change, and now we are too late to make the necessary adjustments to society in order to prevent the ocean temperature from raising to 2 degrees Celsius. The problems that led to these circumstances can no longer be fixed, the scope of runaway climate change is far beyond our ability to impact any meaningful change in how it unfolds, let alone whether it can be prevented. Traditional political ideology has always been predicated on the assumption that civilization will persist indefinitely, but now we find ourselves forced to determine what the value of everything we hold as intrinsic knowledge of liberty, property, and prosperity in the context of the knowledge that humanity, as it exists at the capacity it does now, will no longer exist. Rather than defaulting to hedonism in the face of oblivion, resigning to lives of absolute individual liberty in order to maximize the utility of what time we have left to meaningless pursuits of personal gratification, we believe there are grievances that must be redressed, and that the context of apocalypse, and specifically the conditions that lead to it, makes it absolutely necessary that these injustices be redressed.
The situation we now inhabit is the inevitable conclusion of neoliberal capitalism. It has allowed for industry to become powerful enough to the point where byproducts of production and consumption exact a drastic impact on the sustainability of the world’s climate, and then incentivized industry to deny the reality of their impact for decades, decades where proactive action could have led us down a more hopeful path. Exxon has been aware of CO2’s effect since 1977, 11 years before it came into public awareness. Senior scientist James Black once told Exxon’s management committee that “In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels.” He also predicted that CO2 emissions would lead to an increase in average global temperatures by 2 or 3 degrees, a reality just recently solidified by the 2018 annual IFCC report, an overwhelmingly bleak report that still fails to accurately portray how dire our situation is, failing to account for the impact of permafrost thawing and ice albedo feedback loops on CO2 emissions and global temperature rise respectively. The weight of the inhumanity of these actions is clearer now than ever before. The paradigm of limitless growth, and the artificial moral duty to always expand business, and to always deliver returns to shareholders, created a cultural environment within the realm of private interests that allowed for the obfuscation, misinformation, and outright falsehoods that still pollute general discourse of the topic, fostering an illegitimate but stubborn attitude of outright denial of climate change. Government climate research agencies are frequently forced to withhold information from reports out of fear of “politicizing” issues relating to climate change. The circumstances that allowed for these things to happen are entirely the creation of capitalism, and capitalism dictated the outcome of decisions that were made, so it is completely reasonable to hold capitalism wholly culpable for the circumstances we now find ourselves in.
Under the structure of the world as it is now, the people who have suffered under capitalism, and by extension colonialism, will be the first to suffer the effects of climate change, and will experience them the most drastically. Naturally, the people who suffer the greatest from extreme weather phenomenon are always those who can’t afford to not. Food supplies are destroyed, whilst lands that have historically been arable are suddenly unsuitable for agriculture, destroying the livelihood of farmers, and communities that depend on agricultural exports, further perpetuating the cycle of poverty. Mass migration of people from rural farming areas to urban centers results in heightened political tensions, a fact brutally demonstrated by the ongoing Syrian Civil War, a domestic conflict influenced in part by the migration of people from newly barren farmland in the countryside to dense, urban cities. As time progresses, and as climate change becomes more and more material in people’s lives, these conditions will only become worse, and affect larger portions of the world. Ecosystems that sustain life today by existing in a delicate climate equilibrium will be destroyed.
Ironically, these are generally the same people whose lives have already been subject to the most material ills of capitalism. The exploitation of labor and resources, a practice that has led to the poverty and subjugation of nations, has resulted in massive communities of people wholly unequipped to respond to sudden and drastic shifts in the climate of their environments. In effect, these peoples and nations are now nothing more than the byproducts of industry, every individual person little more than a spent fuel cell, and are regarded as little more than human refuse in comparison to people who are able to accrue great amounts of capital. There is a clear disparity in the value of human life in the world.
Capitalism and the structures that enable it to exist must be abolished, this much is clear to us, but what to do about what already exists? Abolishing capitalism only removes the process by which capital can be accumulated, but it doesn’t address the material inequality it has caused. This is not so much a case of punishment, but a pursuit of justice, a phrase which here means a return to equilibrium of property, in that materials are equally distributed amongst all people proportional to need. In this sense, we must not view property redistribution as a punitive act, but as a retributive one. We must envision ourselves as palliative doctors, providing hospice care for a terminal human existence, and in the process achieve a virtuous epilogue for the human experience.
“Let’s go lets go”
-Jammin Gerald, Pump That Shit Up