Hope Or Now??

      Some years ago I read "The Coming Insurrection" by The Invisible Committee, and found it extremely interesting and informative, an excellent read. Since then I have plucked quotes from them every so often. I am now reading "Now" another of their renderings and again I find it fascinating. It is available as a free download from Libcom Library.
       The following is an extract from the first chapter, "Tomorrow Is Cancelled", I wonder if it resonates with you as it does with me? 

 

 

--------Hope. Now there's at least one disease this civilization has not infected us with. We're not despairing for all that. No one has ever acted out of hope. Hope is of a piece with waiting, with the refusal to see what is there, with the fear of breaking into the present-in short, with the fear of living. To hope is to declare one­self in advance to be without any hold on that from which something is expected nonetheless. It's to remove oneself from the process so as to avoid any connection with its outcome. It's wanting things to be different without embracing the means for this to come about. It's a kind of cowardice. One has to know what to commit to and then commit to it. Even if it means making enemies. Or making friends. Once we know what we want, we're no longer alone, the world repopulates. Everywhere there are allies, closenesses, and an infinite gradation of possible friendships. Nothing is close for someone who floats. Hope, that very slight but constant impetus toward tomorrow that is communicated to us day by day, is the best agent of the maintenance of order. We're daily informed of problems we can do nothing about, but to which there will surely be solutions tomor­row. The whole oppressive feeling of powerlessness that this social organization cultivates in everyone is only an immense pedagogy of waiting. It's an avoidance of now. But there isn't, there's never been, and there never will be anything but now. And even if the past can act upon the now, this is because it has itself never been anything but a now. Just as our tomorrow will be. The only way to understand something in the past is to under­stand that it too used to be a now. It's to feel the faint breath of the air in which the human beings of yesterday lived their lives. If we are so much inclined to flee from now, it's because now is the time of decision. It's the locus of the "I accept" or the "I refuse," of ''I'll pass on that" or ''I'll go with that." It's the locus of the logical act that imme­diately follows the perception. It is the present, and hence the locus of presence. It is the moment, endlessly renewed, of the taking of sides. Thinking in distant terms is always more comfortable. "In the end," things will change; "in the end," beings will be transfigured. Meanwhile, let's go on this way, let's remain what we are. A mind that thinks in terms of the future is incapable of acting in the present. It doesn't seek transformation; it avoids it. The current disaster is like a monstrous accumu­lation of all the deferrals of the past, to which are added those of each day and each moment, in a continuous time slide. But life is always decided now, and now, and now.------

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Tomorrow Is Cancelled.

          Why no hordes on the streets, why no peasants with pitchforks, why no revolution? It is not as if the death and destruction is invisible, or the exploitation unfelt and unseen, or the gross inequality in living standards hidden, it is all there glaringly obvious for all to see. We are awash with information, we see through the lies and illusions, we accept that the propaganda portrayed world and the real world we, the ordinary people live in, are universes apart. Still the vast majority conform to the biased rules, turn up at work, pay their taxes, and run to the ballot box to make their X in the appropriate spot, believing that somehow, this time it will be different. It is a puzzling phenomenon.
       The Invisible Committee have already produced two excellent thought provoking pamphlets/booklets, the first, The Coming Insurrection, the second one, To Our Friends, they have recently come up with a third, Now. Again, interesting, insightful, and thought provoking. The following is an extract from the chapter called Tomorrow Is Cancelled.

 

 

TOMORROW IS CANCELLED

         All the reasons for making a revolution are there. Not one is lacking. The shipwreck of politics, the arrogance of the powerful, the reign of falsehood, the vulgarity of the wealthy, the cataclysms of industry, galloping misery, naked exploitation, ecological apocalypse—we are spared nothing, not even being informed about it all. “Climate: 2016 breaks a heat record,” Le Monde announces, the same as almost every year now. All the reasons are there together, but it’not reasons that make revolutions, it’s bodies. And the bodies are in front of screens. One can watch a presidential election sink like a stone. The transformation of “the most important moment in French political life” into a big trashing fest only makes the soap opera more captivating. One couldn’t imagine Koh-Lanta with such characters, such dizzying plot twists, such cruel tests, or so general a humiliation. The spectacle of politics lives on as the spectacle of its decomposition. Disbelief goes nicely with the filthy landscape. The National Front, that political negation of politics, now that negation of politics on the terrain of politics, logically occupies the “center” of this chessboard of smoking ruins. The human passengers, spellbound, are watching their shipwreck like a first-rate show. They are so enthralled that they don’t feel the water that’s already bathing their legs. In the end, they’ll transform everything into a buoy. The drowning are known for that, for trying to turn everything they touch into a life preserver. This world no longer needs explaining, critiquing, denouncing. We live enveloped in a fog of commentaries and commentaries on commentaries, of critiques and critiques of critiques of critiques, of revelations that don’t trigger anything, other than revelations about the revelations. And this fog is taking away any purchase we might have on the world. There’s nothing to criticize in Donald Trump. As to the worst that can be said about him, he’s already absorbed, incorporated it. He embodies it. He displays on a gold chain all the complaints that people have ever lodged against him. He is his own caricature, and he’s proud of it. Even the creators of South Park are throwing in the towel: “Its very complicated now that satire has become reality. We really tried to laugh about what is going on but it wasn’t possible to maintain the rhythm. What was happening was much funnier that what could be imagined. So we decided to let it go, to let them do their comedy, and we’ll do ours.” We live in a world that has established itself beyond any justification. Here, criticism doesn’t work, any more than satire does. Neither one has any impact. To limit oneself to denouncing discriminations, oppressions, and injustices, and expect to harvest the fruits of that is to get one’s epochs wrong. Leftists who think they can make something happen by lifting the lever of bad conscience are sadly mistaken. They can go and scratch their scabs in public and air their grievances hoping to arouse sympathy as much as they like; they’ll only give rise to contempt and the desire to destroy them. “Victim” has become an insult in every part of the world.

Read the complete chapter HERE:

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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.

Continue reading HERE:

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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.------

Continue reading HERE:

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