Eliminate The Collective.

 

      What some people still don't seem to understand is that the present economic system is hell-bent on eliminating any form of public or community entities. The drive is to make everything and anything that can generate profit to be in the hands of the corporate world. To create a population of individuals with no stake in the world they live in except there labour power, which they will sell to the highest bidder in competition with all the other dispossessed. Then when you are no longer suitable for hire, you can survive as best you can on charity. You should be quite clear in your mind, that in this economic system you are seen as units of production, nothing more and nothing less. If you can't produce for them, you are useless. Welcome to the corporate world's dream, or don't, but instead fight against that corporate dream, which is your worst nightmare.

 This from Roar Magazine:

        Last month, the French philosopher Jacques Rancière addressed a general assembly of striking railway workers at the Montparnasse train station in Paris.

       If I am here today, it is, of course, to affirm my total support for an exemplary struggle, but also to say in a few words why it seems to me to be exemplary.
       I have spent a number of years of my life studying the history of the workers’ movement and it has shown me one essential thing: what we call social benefits is much more than benefits acquired by particular groups — it was the organization of a collective world governed by solidarity.
      What is this special benefits scheme for railway workers that is presented to us as an archaic privilege? It was part of an organization of a common world where the things essential to everyone’s life were supposed to be everyone’s property. The railroads, for example, belonged to the community. And this collective ownership was also managed by a collective of workers who felt committed to that community; workers for whom the retirement of each one was the product of the solidarity of a concrete collective.

Demolish piece by piece

      It is this concrete reality of the collective, united in solidarity, that the powerful of our world no longer want. It is this edifice that they have undertaken to demolish piece by piece. What they want is for there to be no more collective property, no more workers’ collectives, no more solidarity from below. They want there to be only individuals left, possessing their labor power like a small capital that can be made to bear fruit by renting it out to bigger people. Individuals who, by selling themselves day after day, accumulate points for themselves and only for themselves, in anticipation of a future in which pensions will no longer be based on labor but on capital, that is to say on exploitation and self-exploitation.
       That is why pension reform is so decisive for them, why it is much more than a concrete question of financing. It is a question of principle. Retirement is how working time produces living time and how each of us is linked to a collective world. The whole question is to know what makes this link: solidarity or private interest.
      Demolishing the pension system founded on collective struggle and solidarity organization is the decisive victory for our rulers. Twice already they have thrown all their forces into this battle and they have lost. We must do everything possible today to ensure that they lose a third time and that this loss helps them lose their taste for this battle once and for all.

       This text was originally published in French by Le Monde. English translation for ROAR by Joshua Richeson.

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The Death Of A Failed System.

        I recently posted about 2008 being a missed opportunity, and the fact that the disintegrating system will of course throw up other opportunities, and we should be organising for that next, system convulsion. However there is a line of thought that maintains that to wait for that opportunity is foolish, or worse, it is being complicit in prolonging the death-rattle of an already dangerous disintegrating civilisation. We are in the midst of the last convulsions of a crumbling system, its demise will not be a peaceful affair, it will be violently brutal, and savage as it devours itself and humanity, in a vain attempt to survive. For the survival of the planet and humanity, sanity demands the we bring about its death as quickly as possible. However, I believe, sadly, this can only happen when, what I often refer to as, “that great apolitical apathetic horde” open their eyes to the reality of their situation and see the full blown disaster of which they are an integral part. It is all there, the struggling midst poverty and deprivation, brutal wars for power and wealth, the arrogant flaunting of wealth by the few, midst the misery of the many, the vulgar spectacle of opulence trampling the poor, the many dressed in misery and humiliation, justice and compassion battered and blooded. This failed economic system has turned our planet into a theatre where the darkest and most brutal of dystopian plays is being enacted, we are the willing players, who can carry the story to it cataclysmic end, or we can change the script, to one of hope and sustainable survival, but time is running out. 

Tomorrow is cancelled

        It’s useless to wait-for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilization. It is within this reality that we must choose sides.
       The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection

       The Invisible Committee, is one group who advocate the second line of thought, they have already produce two insightful essays, The Coming Insurrection, and, To Our Friends, their third Maintenant(Now) is being translated, one chapter at a time, into English, by Autonomies.

Tomorrow is cancelled         All the reasons for carrying out a revolution are present. None is missing. The sinking of politics, the arrogance of the powerful, the reign of the false, the vulgarity of the wealthy, the cataclysms of industry, rampant poverty, naked exploitation, ecological apocalypse – we are spared nothing, not even that of being informed. “Climate: 2016 breaks the record of heat”, tells us Le Monde on its first page, as almost every year nowadays. All the reasons are united, but it is not reasons that make revolutions, it is bodies. And the bodies are all in front of screens.

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A Fatal Malaise Of A Civilisation.

 

 

        My previous post was in response to the coming UK general election, but this farce, this charade, this competition of liars, is not confined to the UK, it is a world wide illusion, a disease of humanity, a disaster of gigantic proportions, that is rapidly destroying our planet. We recently had "an election" that put a narcissistic unstable moron on the throne of the most powerful imperialist power on Earth. While waiting for the stage production from the UK theatre of lies, we are having the French presidential election spewed over us. None of these events have any possibility of solving the problems we face as a civilisation, all are concerned with the control of power in their personal fiefdoms. All they do is gratify a few messiahs and aggravate the problem that we as a civilisation are now facing.

      The following is from an interview first translated by Ill Wind Editions:

By the way, the book, "The Coming Insurrection" if you haven't yet read it, is well worth getting your hands on.

         Editor’s note:   The trial of Julien Coupat and Mathieu Burnel, known as the “Tarnac affair”, has dragged-on for over eight years now. On the 10^th of January, the Court of Appeals deemed that it was no longer to be classified as a terrorism case. Assumed by many to belong to the Invisible Committee—whose first opus, The Coming Insurrection (2007), was a resounding success—they here take a critical look at the presidential campaign. Their newest book, Maintenant [Now], is due to hit the shelves next week.
***
         Le Monde: What do you make of the presidential campaign?
What campaign? There was no campaign. There was a soap opera, a fairly worn-out one at that, to tell the truth, full of twists and turns, scandals, dramatic tension and suspense. Much brouhaha, a tiny frenzy, but nothing that managed to pierce the wall of generalized confusion. Not that there is any lack of followers for each candidate, tossing-about with varying degrees of fanaticism in their virtual bubbles. But this fanaticism only deepens the feeling of political unreality.
        A graffiti that went up in Place de la Nation during the Mayday demonstration last year stated: "There will be no presidential election”. It suffices to project ourselves ahead to the day after the final round of the election to grasp what’s prophetic in this tag: whatever happens, the new president will be as much a puppet as the current one, the legitimacy of their governance will be just as lacking, just as minoritarian and impotent. This fact isn’t solely due to the extreme withering of politics—to the fact that it has become impossible to believe honestly in all that is done and said there—but is likewise due to the fact that politics is a derisory means of confronting the depth of the current disaster.
        What can politics and its proclamatory universe do when confronted by the concomitant collapse of ecosystems and subjectivities, of the wage society and the global geopolitical order, the meaning of life and the meaning of words? Nothing. It only adds to the disaster. There is no "solution” to the disaster we’re going through. To think in terms of problems and solutions is only one more aspect of this disaster, a way of safeguarding us from any serious questioning. What’s called into question by the current state of the world is not merely a political system or a certain form of social organization but a whole civilization, that is to say, ourselves, our ways of living, of being, of relating and thinking.
        The buffoons who mount their platforms to boast of the “solutions” they’ll be strong enough to enact once elected are only pandering to our need for illusion, our need to believe that some kind of decisive change exists that would spare us, and spare us above all from the need to fight. All the “revolutions” that they promise us are only there so that we may avoid changing who we are, to relieve us of any physical or existential risk. They’re candidates for the deepening of the catastrophe. Seen in this light, it would seem that for some people the need for illusion is virtually insatiable.------

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