On the Brink of Disaster
August 2003, Rekombinant
Let’s take a snapshot of the situation before
everything precipitates; let’s simply try to remind ourselves what has
happened in the world during the preparatory period of a conflict with
unpredictable consequences; let’s delineate scenarios of likely
developments and imagine possibilities to act: let’s build a strategy
for the aftermath of the war. In the days following S11 there was much
talk of the need for the emergence of a third actor in the war between
nazi-liberalism and the indentity-integralist front. On the 15th of
February the third actor showed its face and now operates as a majority
force at the international level. The action against the war must join
the action against liberalist economic dictatorship. Thinking about a
post-war scenario entails thinking –from now- about a way out of the
capitalist domination on society.
Prologue
Since the beginning of the 80’s, when the world was
governed by a leading group of liberal aspiration, all social energies
have been invested in the economy of profit. From Reagan’s America to
Deng Hsiao Ping’s China the watchword ‘get rich’ became the only
imperative and on this criteria a ruling class was selected, with no
culture other than that of profit, no values other than those of
robbery, no strategy other than that of domination and submission. In
the name of the interests of the profit economy it was seen as
legitimate to destroy all social defences, all rights, all forms of
life and culture. Rekombinant technologies (computer and
biotechnologies) have been used as an instrument of economic profit
maximisation. The profit economy has deeply permeated the epistemic
structures and the applications of rekombinant technologies. These
technologies contain an unprecedented capacity to mould and mutate the
human genetic make-up (at the physical, psychic and cognitive level). A
real mutation began to modify the collective body, in accordance with a
paradigm dominated by the criteria of economic profit. Few big
institutions of world government, which nobody ever elected, have
governed the globalisation process that the web technologies have
frenetically accelerated. These institutions (IMF, WTO, WB…) have
imposed in a brutal and blackmailing manner the interests of large
global enterprises on the economic, social, political, technological
and cultural development of each country of the world. This produced
the reduction of social defences against the intrusiveness of profit,
the privatisation of socially indispensable services, the reduction of
public spending on health and education. The end result, largely
visible today, is an increase in ignorance, a reduction of the average
life span, a diffusion of epidemics, a devastation of the environment.
The alliance between capital and
cognitive labour
During the 90’s the development of the economy was
prodigious, not only in western countries. Globalisation gave birth to
new productive classes in eastern countries and enormously expanded the
purchasing power of the western minority integrated in the profit
economy. New productive sectors (first of all those linked to the
digitalisation of production and communication) sustained the demand
for the whole decade and determined the formation of a mass capitalism
to which a conspicuous part of the western population participated,
through a huge diffusion of the social entrepreneurial function and a
progressive identification of labour and enterprise, especially in the
high tech productive sectors. Cognitive labour became the leading
sector of global production, taking the shape of the economicist
ideology and identifying itself with the entrepreneurial function,
participating to the forefront of mass financial capitalism
(dotcom-mania). In the meantime the length of the working day, which
had been in decline up until the end of the ‘70s, began to increase
again after the world victory of liberalism. The free time gained
through a century of workers’ struggle was progressively subsumed to
the rule of profit and transformed into fragmented and diffused labour.
Social energies got progressively subsumed to economic competition.
Those who didn’t run got run over. Society started running frantically
and many broke down.
The breakdown
The competitive mobilisation of social energies
rapidly brought about the break down of the social organism, a
simultaneously nervous and economic break down (but the economy had
already become a mental sphere). From the spring of 2000 the expansive
cycle of the economy started breaking, as a result of various trends:
a) The demand for
new technologies had progressively fallen; the fall of profit in
innovative sectors had been precipitously accelerated.
b)
The perspective of an exhaustion of non-renewable energy sources had
caused a ferocious competition.
c) A
crisis of overproduction had spread on innovative sectors. Huge
quantities of semio-commodities lie unsold. This provoked a fall in the
stock markets, followed by a crisis of trust in the future of mass
capitalism.
d)The investment of
psychic energies into the competitive race provoked an effect of
saturation of attention to the point of creating the conditions for a
generalised break down.
Some global corporations entered a crisis. It
became manifest that the ruling groups of new capitalism had violated
all the rules of economic correctness, robbed collective resources and
governed production without strategic competence, with their attention
entirely focused on the achievement of maximum immediate profit. Faith
in the ruling group of the world economy crumbled. Mass capitalism
began to fall. Unemployment started rising, especially amongst the
generation that was now entering the labour market, who grew up with a
belief in the eternal continuity of economic development.
The lumpen-bourgeoisie prepares for
war
In the meantime a new political class, one that got
rich through robbery and achieved consensus by means of full control
over the media system and the growth of ignorance, went to govern
different western countries. The collective brain for twenty years had
been bombarded by symbols of consumerism and competitive and aggressive
violence. A sort of lumpen-bourgeoisie was formed with the money of
mafia, the robbery of public funding and the money coming from the mass
shares and pension funds. This lumpen-bourgeoisie no longer respected
any principle of legality nor did it possess the strategic qualities of
the protestant capitalism of the past. It was a baroque and cynical
class, ready to use any means to seize power. In Italy the new
governing class emerged out of mafia money, the illegal seizure of an
unbounded power on social communication and the corruption of judges.
In the United States, for the first time in two hundred years, we
witnessed a phenomenon that is comparable to a coup d’�tat. Since
taking power, the new American president put forward an aggressively
hegemonic policy. The first action of Bush’s presidency was to rip the
Kyoto agreements whereby industrialised countries had established a
progressive reduction of toxic emissions in order to limit pollution
and the effects of environmental devastation. The new president
represents the interests of the great oil and weapon producers, who had
economically sustained his electoral campaign. He also represents the
interests of the ruling group of companies, such as ENRON, which have
fallen after robbing the pension funds in which masses of shareholders
had invested. The whole group sustaining Bush is implicated in the
massive failure of American capitalism. Bush’s seizure of power was
also supported by the greatest monopoly of the high-tech industry. In
exchange, the president promised Bill Gates impunity for the
monopolistic policies of Microsoft corporation that had been damaging
mass capitalism and weakening and robbing hundreds of small companies,
thereby hitting on the trust in free enterprise and free market. Bush’s
power is founded on an alliance between old oil and weapons economy, a
failing and thieving lumpen-bourgeois class, and the private monopoly
of information and communication. As soon as the economic break down
begins to precipitate, as if by miracle, three planes fly in the skies
of Washington and New York. Miraculously, capitalism on the verge of
bankruptcy can now invest the energies of the whole society (that show
signs of exhaustion) in the direction of war. The general mobilisation
of these energies begins with a call to a Holy war of the West against
the evils of the world. Here begins the great Manichean campaign of
Good versus Evil. The Good is represented by a group of oil magnates
who have notoriously robbed public funds and lead to the collapse of
giant companies. Since the war on the Afghan population failed to
produce any of the promised results, i.e. the arrest of the heads of
the Al Qaida organisation accused of being responsible for the S11
attacks, the war must be relaunched. A new target is chosen.
The warmongers' bullshit
The motivations for a war on Iraq are ridiculous.
‘Saddam is an enemy of humanity’. Of course, he was one also when he
acted on behalf of the American administration and occupied Iran, as
are many of the American allies such as Sharon and the Saudi dynasty.
‘He used illegal weapons’. As he did in 1988 with the financial and
political support of the USA. ‘He can make nuclear weapons’. Which is
improbable. Anyway, the violations of the non-proliferation treaty are
multiple, starting from Israel. ‘We need to bring democracy to the
Middle East’. Nothing could be more hypocritical. Democracy in the
Middle East would require the departure of Israeli forces from the
occupied territories, the recognition of the political rights of the
Kurdish people, and a reduction of the role of the large oil
corporations that for fifty years have been robbing the resources of
those countries whilst influencing their political life in a direct and
authoritarian manner ever since they hanged Mossadeq for trying to
nationalise the Iranian oil industry. ‘We need to protect the security
of western citizens’. A wave of panic was rising. People died in New
York and Chicago nightclubs because at the first suspect noise they ran
and crashed one another. If the war broke out, terrorism would only
expand. The ideology of security is the product of a paranoia fuelled
by the media and geared to create an economic system of global security
that can always feed on new paranoia. ‘We need to protect our quality
of life’. This is the only sentence that corresponds to truth in the
whole of the war propaganda. 20% of humanity does not wish to give up
the consumption of 80% of the world resources, nor does it want to
renounce driving to the tobacconist, but a generalised massacre is too
high a price for such a stupid wish.
Possible scenarios of development and
the emergence of a third actor
What are the possible scenarios if the war breaks
out? One is that of a rapid victory for the aggressors, the capture of
Baghdad’s criminal, the imposition of a relatively peaceful
protectorate, the American democratisation of the Middle East, the
progressive clearance of conflict zones, the imposition of a planetary
military dictatorship for good purposes. But does anyone believe this
to be possible? The more realistic scenario entails the possibility of
a fall of the Pakistani regime with the gain of two hundred nuclear
heads for the Islamic integralists who gained 20% at the last
elections. It entails a war between Turks and Kurds for the gain of
Kirkuk. It entails the fall of the Saudi regime and the rapid expansion
of Al Qaeda, the explosion of a wave of suicidal murders that will
terrify western cities. The most probable consequence of an aggression
on Iraq is the explosion of Empire, the inauguration of the Empire of
Chaos.
In the meantime, something came to change the whole
scenario: in the framework of a paranoid clash between integralist and
nationalist fanaticism and nazi-capitalist fanaticism, a THIRD ACTOR
has finally emerged, that we have been waiting for since S11, which has
been built with the stubborn labour of the global movement against
corporations. The third actor came into action on February the 15th. It
is the movement of global everyday life that rebels against war
mongering dementia. What we have seen on F15 is a movement that is
destined to expand and radicalise, if the war starts. But at that stage
it will be a matter of working towards pushing the process of exiting
the war to coincide with that of dissolving of the liberist domination
of global capitalism, in order to repose the dynamic of anticapitalist
conflict in society. Capitalism brings war as clouds bring storms, but
in the course of the war the conditions for a re-dislocation of
capitalism are created. There will be no re-edition of a revolutionary
process of the kind of ‘900, but the question of subverting the forces
that produced the war will emerge. Then it will not be sufficient to
eliminate the criminal class that produced the war. It will be
necessary to clarify that war is only the continuation of liberalist
devastation by other means, hence, it will be necessary to cut the
roots of the process that lead to catastrophe.
Ending
In the next few weeks and months we will need to
turn the power that comes from the rebellion against the war into a
generalised disobedience. Those who are being carried away by the war
dementia have no longer any legitimacy to govern. None of their
decisions must be respected. At the same time, we will need to create
the conditions for a self organisation of alternative knowledges and
production. F15 signalled the secession of the majority of society from
war. We will soon have to face the task of organising the secession of
society from capital. Let us start thinking about the aftermath of war.
Translated by Arianna Bove from
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