antyphayes:

Leaflet for (re)Occupy Melbourne

by immediateworldwidedereification on October 27, 2011
Leaflet handed out at Occupy Melbourne 2.0 on 29th October

It doesn’t make any sense!

“You’ve made your point, now move along” is their refrain, showing that they’ve completely missed the point themselves.

If we don’t have any leaders, it’s because we don’t want to be followers; we don’t want our movement’s energy to be channelled back into the same old fake ‘solutions’.

Capital’s reach seems total…

The violent expansion of capitalism over the last few centuries has seen its reach extend to every corner of the globe, and its logic shape every aspect of our lives. What we do to survive, what we do for fun, our sexuality, our gender, every role that we play has been intimately shaped by capital’s domination. Capital turns us into objects and uses us when it’s profitable, and spits us out when it’s not. Thousands each day die of hunger and disease because it’s not profitable to feed them or heal them. Hundreds of millions live in shanty towns and slums because there’s no money to be made building decent houses. The environmental crisis spirals further out of control, because it’s not profitable to stop it. Productivity is ever-increasing, abundance is everywhere, and yet it’s impossible to live a decent life unless you can find a way to get money. Over two billion humans can’t get jobs even if they wanted them because capitalism has no need for them. And billions more waste their lives doing pointless soul-crushing, health-destroying work that exists only to make someone, somewhere a profit. Even where our jobs could be useful, the logic of money has shaped them so utterly that they might as well not be.

If there’s one thing that stands out about this occupation, and the occupations worldwide, it’s the amazing mutual aid and community that has developed around them. All sorts of people from all sorts of different backgrounds are coming together and becoming open to new perspectives, questioning old assumptions, putting time and energy into things they find useful, actively communicating with each other and relating to each other as humans, without the filter of money.

What we’re glimpsing is the possibility of a post-capitalist world, where human relations aren’t commercial transactions, where goods don’t represent money but a concrete means to satisfy real human needs. A world in which competing corporations and warring nations are replaced by a real, human community that uses the resources of all for the benefit of all. Such a world could be called communism but has nothing in common with the state-capitalist regimes that exist or existed in Russia, China and Cuba. Nothing is changed fundamentally if capitalists are replaced with bureaucrats with “better intentions”. Those regimes were not only thoroughly undemocratic, they also perpetuate wage-labor, exploitation and oppression of the vast majority of the population. The change must go deeper and must free the oppressed, make them part of a real democracy instead of the lie we have today.

Capitalism is in crisis, and its states have no choice but to go on the attack. Capital’s profit has been slipping for years, and its representatives are rushing to save it, no matter what the cost to us. Governments across the world of all stripes – Socialist governments in Spain and Greece, Conservatives in the UK, Democrats in the USA, despots in Syria, Tunisia and Egypt, Labour in Australia… all are bound to the logic of capital. All must keep the economy afloat, and that means by attacking us – whether it’s directly through austerity measures that make us suffer for capital’s profit, or more subtly by massive public spending that increases inflation and makes us effectively poorer anyway. Whatever political party gets in, they’ll still have the economy – capitalism – to manage, and will do so at our expense, no matter how green, sustainable and democratic their rhetoric may be when they’re not in power…

Capitalism is in crisis, and there is only one way out

“This is not a police state, we are here to demonstrate” goes the slogan, overlooking that police are integral to the state, which is in turn integral to capitalism, and that movements that merely demonstrate don’t challenge any of these.

Of course, the movement now is only small, but we can see it growing by the day. The more we talk and discuss and act, the more we occupy, the closer we come to a better world, a human world. Let nothing be taboo. Talk to everyone about the movement, identify its limits, and move beyond them.

Occupy everything. Take everything. Change everything.

This is just the beginning…

by spasssmaschine@googlemail.com

In the northern suburbs of Canberra in an alleyway one can find the above graffiti. It is a translation of the final line of J. Arthur Rimbaud’s poem Matinée d’Ivresse—Drunken Morning. In the original the line reads ‘Voici le temps des Assassins.’

I discovered this graffiti some years ago, I can’t remember exactly when—five years at most. At the time I was quite excited, imagining the perpetrators and their rage against suburban Canberra. I dreamt of meeting these mysterious figures and embarking on a city wide spree of poetry; an outpouring of words to make the shame of Canberra more shameful by making it public; the city whose proletarian reality is barely masked by its bourgeois pretension and appearance.

It began in utter boorishness, and now it ends
In angels of fire and ice.

We would steal through the nights, modern hashshashin drunk on poetry and truth. Alas I have never found the perpetrators, or perpetrator.

Arguably the poem is about or at least influenced by the smoking of hash, the time of the hashshashin.

This poison will stay in our veins even when, as the fanfares depart,
We return to our former disharmony.

In the time of its writing, the early 1870s, literary Paris had been sometime fascinated by the Orient. The story of the hashshashin had been popularised by the French orientalist Sylvestre de Sacy, who had written of the them in 1809 as a drug crazed sect of murderers during the Middle Ages.

We have faith in poison.
We will give our lives completely, every day.

Though still a popular conception, this appears to be fallacious.

Over the years I have scrawled my words and other peoples’ words across the walls of this city. A photograph of one of my efforts, ‘These Bad Days Will End,’ can be found in Julian Fleetwood’s A Zine about Canberra, though this graffito itself is no more, lost to the march of redevelopment and sanitary urbanism.

The situationists recommended détournement as a method of using the cultural detritus of mass production for not merely creative ends (like making more crap things for sale), but more importantly for refashioning our lives, for creating our lives for no other reason that we are briefly alive and becoming before we are nothing again. However the greatest impediment to the rational use of the products of capitalist society is the irrational capitalist organisation of everyday life. Instead of a dance to the music of time life has become a contest of endurance as we are goaded on to grasp and accumulate even as we lose everything, as we must.

I unreservedly recommend to the inhabitants of particular zones, transient or otherwise, remaking and refashioning the decor of their days and lives, in the style of the imaginary hashshashin of north Canberra,

FOR THIS IS THE ASSASSINS’ HOUR.

[Excerpts taken from Paul Schmidt’s translation of Matinée d’Ivresse]

In the zombie invasion I lost everything even myself
The zombies came from else-when from right out-of-space
We had long imagined the infestation of our bad conscience our worst fears
Instead this virus was a confabulation; like our culture
Its protein jacket a series of non-existent walls inside your head
How paradoxical
Is a head; without a body?

In the zombie invasion I lost everything even my dollars
They turned to dust on exposure to the light
The zombie ships cooked the planet below their parabolic mirrors shone high
From the sky the waves came and death rolled over us
Nothing was too good or unworthy of a bite; the bait is in our veins
They call it life
I call it blood and strife

In the zombie invasion I lost everything even my mother
She joined their ranks at the drop of a tea set
They crashed in plates cracked the exquisite gold leaf under microwave assault
White hot sparks; incandescent
I remember a cup spinning in the steel cavity of an oven
I remember the infested house
Burning flesh and an excess of bodily fluids sprayed about

In the zombie invasion I lost everything even my lust
For everything and everybody turned inside out
Except those that ran and fought and fled wherever
Along the empty roads and abandoned wrecks
My personality is absorbed as the world dissolves and history is re-set
We begin again
Without a head; without a soul

In the zombie invasion I lust everything even my wife
She feeds on a young man devours him all eventually
How long does it take to consume a corpse or produce a life?
She crouches and licks her chops
Better to be a meal than a converted body evacuated of days and melancholy
How to stop her?
Stop thinking her; she is over; bash! bash! bash!

In the zombie invasion I found my father asleep
I found him under the stone planted on mother
On her dead eyes her smashed in jaw I buried her in a hurry
Sometimes I sleep I hide away from the air
To dream there is no-one no shadows
I am alone in a series of postures that move quickly; that stop
Like my father
My mother is the world; grows cold

In the zombie invasion all I did was write this stupid poem
It came shambling to the front as they say shambling to the front of my thought
But that is a lie I wrote nothing and my thoughts do not shamble
Like zombies they run they never stop
They just get vague and dreamy from time to time
Fixated on the slaughter
Devouring brains and words and order; all order

In the zombie invasion I lost everything even the will to write
My zombie poem has a conventional structure
It is made up of letters phonemes thoughts made from flesh
But a grunt will do or a cry
A terrible deafening wail as they find you and descend
Hunt them down!
Destroy them all! No quarter!

In the zombie invasion I lost everything even the smell of rot
The days still pass one day just like any other
Now they hold a struggle with a foe that does not recognise
Only the desire for brains; not what they make
How does one stop this all consuming?
The blank sun shines; on the dead and the living
Become living death
It ends with a rattle; with a wheeze

      August/September 2010

Following this paragraph is the text from a leaflet I handed out at the Traverse Poetry Project’s showcase at the You Are Here festival at the “smithdick” corner replete with Ray White real estate offer for a reasonable deal and “quiet riot” gripes on Saturday 14 March 2011. To David Finnigan’s question on the night regarding the leaflet being merely negative I answered “no.” Guilty as charged. I am not against the attempts to use urban space in a more creative fashion; I believe there should be more of this. However I do believe we should combine our artistic reappropriation of life from the boredom of wage slavery with a critique of wage slavery; that is we should make what is implicit in our creative practice - a critique of alienating work practices - an explicit part of our creative practice. Further we should combine this with an argument of why wage slavery is the greatest enemy of a creative and rational control everyday life. Capitalism will not give us space elevators or real creative freedom; and by real I mean a materially wealthy and ideas rich world in which the market is not the primary principle of social organisation.

TRAVERSE POETRY PROJECT… YOUAREHERE… YOUR TIME IS UP… RETURN TO THE VATS…

As I mosey on into town what do I see before me pilgrim? Julian Fleetwood’s Traverse Poetry Project showcase brought to you by David Finnigan et al’s You Are Here festival. The Traverse Poetry Project full of such promise has struggled with its worse face from the outset: the pores of the market. Competition is an interesting principle to organise creative production around and great results are often in the offing—but there are worlds of difference between the Dionysia of Ancient Athens and the culture factories of today. When a society submits everything to the rule of the commodity and competition under the false claims of the ‘rationality’ of the market something is wrong (cf. still unfolding oil wars and economic and political and environmental crisis from 2007/08 to now regarding the rationality of the market). It is the totalitarian domination of the principle of ‘what’s in it for me?’ in its various guises with occasional playful respite—like Traverse Poetry.

Despite the obvious talent on show tonight ladies and gentlemen there is no progress in comparing the work of the poet to that of a whore.  By turning the world into a brothel do we celebrate the oldest profession? Or is this the miserable song of our own slavery? Pimp and whore; master and servant; we drink to dull the noise of this party in the shadows with small change to spare. We hail the new aesthetic: Again! Creativity! Whatever! Hoorah! We hail the meat for sale. Poetry must be made by all not by one. The market in poetry is overrated. Why buy when you can sell? And if we are all sellers why not make a gift of your words your sweet memories reshuffled and forgotten? Down with the market in poetry and off with your heads they are not that different; go on grab the ears and see. Idiots! Pedlars in the misery of curtains! What’s behind the curtain?

The traverse poetry project could have been a conversation, an argument about creation, about how to live; about poetry. Instead entertainment won. Traverse skirts the one dimensional no one is a winner culture of the market in culture when it sets out to showcase poets like this year’s best new product. Come on, invest everybody! Show poets talk good; speak funny! Poetry can be fun too! Damn right it is fun but not when you have to whore it. In capitalist society we are increasingly driven to be both whore and pimp of our eminently marketable existence.  We become our own slave drivers, our own sub contractors: we write for ourselves and for the man. And sometimes we even reach the utopia of poetry in our laments for this world; pale reflections of the ‘ought’ in the midst of the ‘is’.

In the realm of the ‘ought’ Finnigan’s You Are Here festival admirably points to the empty shop spaces and asks ‘why can’t we create here?’  However such questions cannot be adequately answered by well meaning (or otherwise) art bureaucrats doling out cash. Too much depends upon the whim and largesse of the capricious patrons of the state and controllers of wealth. If by simply holding the festival Finnigan is suggesting we should take over these spaces take over this world our world at anytime or all the time not just festival time that we should squat these spaces occupy them and turn them into living artworks or just living works—then right on and roll on. I suspect that this is not the case.

So farewell Traverse, you are here…

BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

 

The History of Science Fiction,

           so far, or is it all over? Stay tuned.

And where to fit in ‘foreign’ SF? Maybe as an unspeakable tumour or cyst, like Stanislaw Lem mysteriously floating around the New Wave banner. Who else? Name your favourite ones forgotten. Julian Gracq. The Strugatsky’s.  Isidore Ducasse. G.W.F. Hegel.

Millennia constitute its hideous tale; nothing much counts as SF before 1800 even if the bulk of all hitherto poetry appears to be the condition of modern SF and then BANG! it’s 1800 and SF is taking off with Stephenson’s Rocket! Speculative Science Fiction Fiction the vastest beastie of them all; after all everything points to its historical necessity!

Other mysterious and unfortunate omissions: M. John Harrison and what should be J.G. Ballard’s ‘The Crystal World’ is just ‘The Crystal.’ We want the world and we want it…

Aktion Surreal is the name of an art-terrorist group I was a founder of and a member of between 1991 and 1994. Art, because we made stuff; terror, because we were adept at pissing people off, destroying stuff and not following rules – some of us at least. We also believed and many of us still believe that we can make a better more rational and creative world. That marked us out from the other art junkies of Canberra and the world.

Gerald Keaney has now written an account of this group and its aftermath sprayed over the rest of the 1990s and beyond. I am working on account probably as you read this. Either that or I will be asleep, or something else.

 

What Lies Beneath?

One

The future will be empty; evacuated; devoid of the living. The human race has lost and we go on pretending; the human race is lost. Can we find some specimens amidst the wreckage? In the year twenty-eleven there are some living in the ruins of a state bureaucracy; the empty arteries of an artificial brain; a vanished nation.

This city has passed; it was precisely what they imagined; the movement of millions had demolished it; demolition and negative thought. Behind the avenues and overgrown parks behind the living a cool phantasm had spread; a desert of desire. No one crosses these sands they merely calculate the shifting boundary after the shift; or give up and drive for the centre; they drive and then disappear. No one returns.

In the recording stations along the edges we pretend that the sand is an invitation; we pretend it is a vast beach turned in upon itself. The ocean recedes shimmering above the mounds and ridges. At the centre the exact origin of the growth there is a ship a broken wreck named That Which Lies Beneath. Within mysteries beyond compare. The barnacles that grow on its hull in regular patterns one, two, many sided, come no closer to the cargo than you or I. The source of the desert is a wreck and always remains.

Of the source I dream.
In the city I dream.
Over counters I dream.
Coffee tables I dream.
The zones that I pass through as rapidly as the goods and services I buy and sell.

We are our own carpetbaggers; our own undertakers; not even footballs;
And we have answered long ago the question of how to industrialise private life:
1. Drive the desert into the future forever after;
2. Hide it within a desert more grandiose of panoply multiform;
3. Find disciples to write odes to this barren; the billions must be dissolved in its utter exhausted issue:

Poems more poems for the desert!

Poems more poems is alpha and omega Moses and the prophets. Produce more poems many poems far flung asymptote of mastery without masters without poems necessarily without poems an immense accumulation of poems its unit being a single poem; this poem.

This poem will wear out; they all do in the end.

Two

Across the desert the grains pile up; around That Which Lies Beneath and its unspeakable cargo.

On the edge where the desert sands cease the recording stations trace every sensation. They will continue until the extinction or replacement of the sun. Upon the spinning drums of fate a needle scratches the point of inception.

Each recording station stands in for each person stands in for each person that ever lived or ever will; the matter of the memory of matter undergoing collapse; every being generating data or is generated in turn; needles scratch at the point of inception.

Across the desert the grains pile up; around That Which Lies Beneath and its unspeakable cargo.

The ship ebbs; the sand drifts; the hum of this passage.

 

NB. This poem-object is also the script for a projected film. More on this later.

The bulk of this poem was written before the beginning of the mass protests in Cairo and Egypt on the 25th of January or after the resignation of Mubarak on the 11th of February. A mere bit was written during these events mostly due to being either glued to the net reading about it and watching and listening as it unfolded, or worrying about my post graduate study or lack thereof or other attempts to dispel the counter-revolutionary boredom of life entwined in capitalist social relations.

The Frightening

To complete add Marx and remain open-ended, as you must in any case. And there you have it, an imaginary sequence of neuro-characterological attributes distilled from the vast palpitating social-being we call "home" or more usually "me." Er, me mean "we."

Back in April of this year an article I wrote, Pro-revolutionaries and trade unions, was published in the anarchist zine Mutiny. The article was in response to an argument that had arisen amongst members of the Workers Solidarity Network (WSN). At the time I was a member of the network. I resigned from the WSN shortly after the publication of my article due to my disagreement with the WSN’s strategy in an industrial dispute amongst bus drivers in Canberra.

My article was an attempt to address what I consider the false idea that trade unions, either now or in the past, have a revolutionary ‘essence’ that has been corrupted or diverted for whatever reason—whether by seemingly impersonal historical forces or greedy spineless bureaucrats. I offered an argument that pointed to the origins of trade unions in the struggle of workers to both regulate the working day and gain access to better wages and conditions. Because unions originated in this struggle, I reasoned that if there is to be such an ‘essence’ it would be related to the struggle to regulate capitalist social relations rather than do away with them. For such struggles to become revolutionary in the sense of doing away with capitalism, workers would need to break from struggles around the wage and waged-work—that is break from such an historical essence rather than ‘realise’ it. To argue as many in the WSN do, that trade unions are essentially revolutionary or could be made so, is not only to trade in dubious abstractions, but also disarms people in the face of the difficult intellectual and material struggle that is required to foster potentially revolutionary practices.

One need only look to  Greece and France to see the stifling role of trade unions under conditions of heightened class conflict, let alone the relatively low levels of conflict currently in Australia.

In the June issue Lindsay Hawkins responded to my article, and defended the idea of trade unions being essentially radical or revolutionary. I wrote one response for the September issue of Mutiny, but it was not published in that issue as I apparently submitted it too late. So I re-wrote it entirely for the October issue. Sadly the October issue has yet to appear. Below is the article I submitted for that issue of Mutiny.
———

Against capital; against work

In Mutiny # 51 Lindsay Hawkins wrote a piece called ‘Radical Unionism’ which was a response to my article ‘Pro-revolutionaries and trade unions’ in Mutiny # 49. Against the general line of my article he wrote ‘that unions have revolutionary potential and that workers should not automatically reject involvement in trade union activity.’ In particular Lindsay proposes the Workers Solidarity Network as a possible practice to the end of ‘radical unionism.’

I certainly wrote that ‘I have argued that comrades should not be involved in trade unions.’ I do argue such and I continue to. But as we know context is everything, and the context in this case is what I wrote immediately after this quotation:

we should not view trade unions as examples of working class self-organisation against capital. Rather trade unions are emblematic of one way that capital organises labour – obviously there are other ways that capital organises labour from more ‘democratic’ methods right through to terroristic and dictatorial methods. In essence my point was to clarify that working class self-organisation against capital and trade unions are not synonymous.

 

Perhaps I should have been clearer in my earlier piece. Rather than writing ‘comrades should not be involved in trade unions’ I should have written ‘comrades involved in trade unions will find they cannot act in a pro-revolutionary fashion unless they directly confront the pro-capitalist nature of trade unionism.’ And here is the real essence of my argument. I am not opposed to nor would I suggest that we should not struggle for a better deal in regards to the rate which capitalists exploit our labour-power. However the transformation of such struggles over the rate of exploitation, struggles that necessary accept the capitalist logic of this exploitation, will necessitate a break with such struggles. This was the point of quoting Marx:

Instead of the conservative motto, “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, “Abolition of the wages system!”

 

Marx was clear that a break from merely economic struggles was required for struggles to become revolutionary. And we should remember that in 1865 when he was writing, working class self-organisation had not been formalised in relation to individual capitals and the state to the extent to which it has been since. One need only conjure the Accord process presided over by the ACTU in the 1980s and 90s to understand what I mean by such a formalisation.

The only way pro-revolutionists can engage with trade unions is negatively. This is not a call for an all out war with trade unions and their supposed compromised leadership. Rather it is a call for patient and considered work, necessarily theoretical and practical, which attempts to demonstrate on the one hand the limitations of trade unions and on the other hand why workers need to go beyond trade union organisation and ultimately capitalist work itself in order to be finally done with the see-saw of class struggle.

In order to understand this better we need to grapple with the history and development of trade unions. In his article Lindsey writes that trade unions have a revolutionary history and a revolutionary potential. However by emphasising a spurious revolutionary history for trade unions he misses and obscures the real object of such a history: those people that have carried out revolutionary struggles against their reduction to being mere working class material for capital.  And if there is a central point to my argument than it is this. As I wrote in my earlier Mutiny piece: ‘my point was to clarify that working class self-organisation against capital and trade unions are not synonymous.’ And it is this point that Lindsay fails to engage with as he conflates trade union struggles with self-conscious struggles against capitalist society. Our mistake would be to go on pretending that a project of emancipation can be based upon radicalising economic struggles for bigger cages with golden bars. This is something Marx clearly understood when he wrote 150 years ago, ‘to clamour for equal or even equitable retribution on the basis of the wages system is the same as to clamour for freedom on the basis of the slavery system.’

This is not to suggest that we either struggle for better wages and conditions or we struggle for the overthrow of capital and wage-slavery. That would be to pose a false dichotomy. Rather in organising and fighting for better wages and conditions we need to clearly demonstrate the limitations of such struggles and why we need to move beyond this horizon.

The revolutionary significance of economic struggles is precisely not their apparent content: wages and conditions. And this is not to denigrate the struggles we fight in order to get access to a wage and more human conditions at work. Rather it is to point out that the real gain of such struggles is the creation and experience of new needs that point beyond particular wage struggles. We create bonds of solidarity with other people. Such a perspective that looks beyond capital and beyond wage slavery is in danger of being lost by Lindsay when he writes of ‘our unions’ and ‘our allegiance […] to our class.’ What is ‘our’ class? To be a wage-slave is not something to be proud of; rather it is a misery. It is through our resistance to being reduced to mere working class material for capital that we open up possibilities beyond wage-slavery. It is through our struggles against the artificially imposed need to sell our ability to work that we begin to understand and create the conditions for lives beyond wage-slavery. Thus any dignity we gain is not through simply identifying ourselves as working class; rather it is in and through the communities of solidarity that we help to create when we struggle against our atomisation and reduction to mere labour-power for sale.

Productive activity in contemporary capitalist societies is work which produces a commodity—whether a thing or a service—that is sold for a profit. Capitalist work, through the complexity of its various fragmentary divisions, hierarchical organisation and bureaucratic management, is the result of the vast class struggles fought over the last few centuries; class struggles waged by the early capitalist class to convert and destroy older forms of productive activity in order to fashion a peculiarly capitalist version of work organised around commodity production. Today there is no essentially life affirming productive activity hidden behind the mask of wage labour, there is just work; a planet organised around the artificial ‘need’ for a wage and market relations. If there is something to be celebrated amongst all of this it is those practices which we develop in order to resist the conversion of all of life into work for capital; whether producing or consuming commodities. It is this world of work that we need to liberate ourselves from.

Trade unions originated in the struggle over the regulation of the working day—that is the struggle over the rate of exploitation and the wages received for this exploitation. Because trade unions originated in the struggle of people to just simply live on the terms given them by the capitalist organisation of life, trade unions have been shaped and determined overwhelmingly by capitalist society. And it is this tendency to limit working class struggle to merely negotiating the terms of its exploitation under capital that has driven workers to confront unions time and again—even and especially when these struggles have begun as union struggles.

When Lindsay cites the IWW around the First World War, the Spanish CNT of 1936-39 and the NSW BLF in the 1970s as examples of revolutionary trade unionism, he fails to provide either a historical context for their practices—e.g. the heightened class struggle in the societies of those times—or the actual limits of trade unionism that these workers and organisations came up against. To cite only one of the more glaring instances, the NSW BLF met one of these limits in the form of the federal leadership of the union under Norm Gallagher cooperating with the Australian state in order to undermine and smash what was considered a rogue branch.

Undoubtedly any move toward organising independently of trade unions, the state and capital should be encouraged and pushed. Here Lindsay and I can agree that the formation of a Workers Solidarity Network is a good thing. Where we differ is in how best to push forward such autonomous organising. Without clear arguments that, on the one hand attempt to understand the limits of struggles within capitalist society, and on the other hand demonstrate why such struggles must confront these limits, we will merely contribute to the disarming of those of us struggling for a world beyond capital and wage-labour.

Anthony Hayes
Canberra