Venomous Butterfly Publications
It is particularly useful that, as Italians, Crisso and Odoteo are familiar with the various movements that have been influenced by Negri, as well as with recent works of his that are not available in English. This allows them to place Empire in a context that further exposes its recuperative significance.
Crisso and Odoteo clearly expose the love Hardt and Negri actually have for the Empire and its methods of homogenizing the world. It, in fact, reaches the point of support for the European Union. Negri recently co-edited a collection of texts by leftists in praise of the political unification of Europe (choosing however to ignore the fact that this unification is a reality mainly in terms of the needs of the ruling class: a free flow of capital, the unification of policing networks and so on).
More frightening is their unquestioning support of the totality of technological development – proclaimed to be expressions of the desires of “the multitude” – going so far as to call for the “recognition […] that there are no boundaries between […] the human and the machine” (Empire, p. 215) and, thus, the acceptance of ourselves as cyborgs (see for example, Empire, p.92). For them the project of technologizing life – i.e., biotechnology integrated with cybernetics – is desirable and necessary, simply because it exists.
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Monday, March 10, 2008
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Wolfi Landstreicher - Willfull Disobedience-Selections from Volume 2; Nr.10-12
Venomous Butterfly Publications
It can be argued that democracy is the very heart of capitalism. Capitalism views people as equivalent in terms of the work they do - it reduces people to simple labor power. Democracy views people as equivalent in terms of voting, in terms of having an equal say in some machinery controlling you. Here too, Justice and morality are equivalent parts of this machinery.
So why do so many anarchists embrace democracy?
-- Because being against "authority" seems to many of them to be simply being in favor of Justice, perhaps?
-- Because they haven't rejected exchange and the way that exchange can work to make people equivalent to each other. Perhaps it is similar to what Nietzsche called the final cruelty of Christians, the need to kill God to keep the logic of religion.
Many anarchists feel the need to kill the top, the boss, of a bureaucracy in order to keep the bureaucracy itself alive.
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It can be argued that democracy is the very heart of capitalism. Capitalism views people as equivalent in terms of the work they do - it reduces people to simple labor power. Democracy views people as equivalent in terms of voting, in terms of having an equal say in some machinery controlling you. Here too, Justice and morality are equivalent parts of this machinery.
So why do so many anarchists embrace democracy?
-- Because being against "authority" seems to many of them to be simply being in favor of Justice, perhaps?
-- Because they haven't rejected exchange and the way that exchange can work to make people equivalent to each other. Perhaps it is similar to what Nietzsche called the final cruelty of Christians, the need to kill God to keep the logic of religion.
Many anarchists feel the need to kill the top, the boss, of a bureaucracy in order to keep the bureaucracy itself alive.
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Wolfi Landstreicher - Willfull Disobedience-Selections from Volume 2; Nr.7-9
Venomous Butterfly Publications
What is a militant? What is the left? Leftists altogether could be defined as the international association of specialists in oppression. From racism to sexism to ageism to class oppression to looksism to homophobia and so forth, leftists study, quantify and aspire to own each different sort of oppression. A racial nationalist who presents him or herself as the only authority on the feelings, ideas and aspirations of black or latino people is one classic example of a leftist. A feminist academic who presents her or himself as the only authority on the feelings, ideas and aspirations of women is also a classic leftist.
The leftist militant derives their need for constant action from their cultivation of guilt. The need for action and the cultivation of guilt soon overwhelms any consciousness of the larger purpose of their action. Soon the domination of leftism, of guilt politics, becomes more important than any positive outcome of the activity.
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What is a militant? What is the left? Leftists altogether could be defined as the international association of specialists in oppression. From racism to sexism to ageism to class oppression to looksism to homophobia and so forth, leftists study, quantify and aspire to own each different sort of oppression. A racial nationalist who presents him or herself as the only authority on the feelings, ideas and aspirations of black or latino people is one classic example of a leftist. A feminist academic who presents her or himself as the only authority on the feelings, ideas and aspirations of women is also a classic leftist.
The leftist militant derives their need for constant action from their cultivation of guilt. The need for action and the cultivation of guilt soon overwhelms any consciousness of the larger purpose of their action. Soon the domination of leftism, of guilt politics, becomes more important than any positive outcome of the activity.
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Wolfi Landstreicher - Willfull Disobedience-Selections from Volume 2; Nr.1-6
Venomous Butterfly Publications
The informal anarchist organization has nothing to do with programs, platforms or flags but is based on a common affinity between comrades whose objective is to intervene in struggles
in an insurrectional direction. In that way it is possible to be present in and heighten the class struggle.
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The informal anarchist organization has nothing to do with programs, platforms or flags but is based on a common affinity between comrades whose objective is to intervene in struggles
in an insurrectional direction. In that way it is possible to be present in and heighten the class struggle.
Download PDF here
Monday, March 3, 2008
Wolfi Landstreicher - Willfull Disobedience-Volume 5, Number 3
Venomous Butterfly Publications
We have a tendency to overvalue words. We put so much time into producing them, as if they were the source of life itself. We believe that there are words and ways of using words that are inherent sources of oppression and spend vast amounts of time trying to suppress these words impoverishing our language in the process. In the meantime, the real practices of oppression go on, often carefully using the correct words to hide the practical reality. At the same time, we think that if we find the right combination of words, this will spark rebellion. So we make flyer after flyer, zine after zine, with an evangelistic zeal, forgetting our own lives, our own desire for freedom, joy and the intensity of existence. By giving words such great value, we forget our own purpose in using them. They become our masters. This becomes evident in the attempt to evangelize, where our words become means for winning others over to a position, assuming that when enough people believe the right thing, they will rise up. But have those who rise up for words, and not for their lives, really risen up at all, or are they just embracing a new master? If my aim is to take back my life, to create my desire, my joy, my passion, then how can I turn my words into tools for a position? They would cease to be my own words. For me, words can only be a tool (or toy) for expressing and communicating my desire, my project, my life; one of the many tools I use to find accomplices, to create my enjoyment and to express the intensity of my passions, the wildness of my dreams. But disconnected from life, from practice, they are empty. And any word in the service of a cause, any evangelistic word, any word intended to draw followers to a position, has been disconnected from life, separated from the immediate practice of freedom, and so is empty. Thus, in overvaluing words, we drain them of meaning, because their meaning comes precisely from our lives and our choices.
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We have a tendency to overvalue words. We put so much time into producing them, as if they were the source of life itself. We believe that there are words and ways of using words that are inherent sources of oppression and spend vast amounts of time trying to suppress these words impoverishing our language in the process. In the meantime, the real practices of oppression go on, often carefully using the correct words to hide the practical reality. At the same time, we think that if we find the right combination of words, this will spark rebellion. So we make flyer after flyer, zine after zine, with an evangelistic zeal, forgetting our own lives, our own desire for freedom, joy and the intensity of existence. By giving words such great value, we forget our own purpose in using them. They become our masters. This becomes evident in the attempt to evangelize, where our words become means for winning others over to a position, assuming that when enough people believe the right thing, they will rise up. But have those who rise up for words, and not for their lives, really risen up at all, or are they just embracing a new master? If my aim is to take back my life, to create my desire, my joy, my passion, then how can I turn my words into tools for a position? They would cease to be my own words. For me, words can only be a tool (or toy) for expressing and communicating my desire, my project, my life; one of the many tools I use to find accomplices, to create my enjoyment and to express the intensity of my passions, the wildness of my dreams. But disconnected from life, from practice, they are empty. And any word in the service of a cause, any evangelistic word, any word intended to draw followers to a position, has been disconnected from life, separated from the immediate practice of freedom, and so is empty. Thus, in overvaluing words, we drain them of meaning, because their meaning comes precisely from our lives and our choices.
Download PDF here
Wolfi Landstreicher - Willfull Disobedience-Volume 5, Number 2
Venomous Butterfly Publications
We are living in desperate times. The capacity to dream and desire appears to be depleted. Most people merely seem to resign themselves to what is. It is, therefore, not surprising that even some anarchists are turning to apocalyptic visions of “the end” rather than pursuing projects of revolutionary transformation – projects which require a capacity both to dream and desire and to look at the world as it is in terms of how to go about realizing those dreams and desires. I have recently heard certain anarchists declare that revolutionary projects are “unrealistic” and that people should instead prepare for an inevitable collapse of civilization. The determinism inherent in this view may give those who hold it a kind of hope, but it is a sad hope, lacking joy. The joylessness of this perspective stems from the fact that those who hold it are placing their bet on an apocalyptic event that is beyond their control rather than on their own capacity to act and interact, to join together with others to create a rupture with the present.
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We are living in desperate times. The capacity to dream and desire appears to be depleted. Most people merely seem to resign themselves to what is. It is, therefore, not surprising that even some anarchists are turning to apocalyptic visions of “the end” rather than pursuing projects of revolutionary transformation – projects which require a capacity both to dream and desire and to look at the world as it is in terms of how to go about realizing those dreams and desires. I have recently heard certain anarchists declare that revolutionary projects are “unrealistic” and that people should instead prepare for an inevitable collapse of civilization. The determinism inherent in this view may give those who hold it a kind of hope, but it is a sad hope, lacking joy. The joylessness of this perspective stems from the fact that those who hold it are placing their bet on an apocalyptic event that is beyond their control rather than on their own capacity to act and interact, to join together with others to create a rupture with the present.
Download PDF here
Wolfi Landstreicher: Willfull Disobedience-Volume 5-Number 1
Venomous Butterfly Publication
In this abyss of war, hunger, pandemic disease and desperation, the threatening flames of proletarian rebellion are leaping up more often. From Argentina to Algeria to the Far East, they split the capitalist order. The exhaustion of these revolts, their suffocation in nationalist,
fundamentalist or ethnic drifts depends only on their isolation.
Attacking the state and property, insurgents everywhere speak to us. It is just up to us to respond, bringing their attack here into the big cities of the West, where the conditions of life are crushed more and more every day between precariousness and fear and where social life is militarized as if in an internal front that does not allow desertion.
Because it is here, where the beating heart of the Economy and its armed hands reside, that the capitalist order can be smashed, when the flames ignited by the exploited of the planet set fire to the minds of their class brothers and sisters in the West.
Download PDF here
In this abyss of war, hunger, pandemic disease and desperation, the threatening flames of proletarian rebellion are leaping up more often. From Argentina to Algeria to the Far East, they split the capitalist order. The exhaustion of these revolts, their suffocation in nationalist,
fundamentalist or ethnic drifts depends only on their isolation.
Attacking the state and property, insurgents everywhere speak to us. It is just up to us to respond, bringing their attack here into the big cities of the West, where the conditions of life are crushed more and more every day between precariousness and fear and where social life is militarized as if in an internal front that does not allow desertion.
Because it is here, where the beating heart of the Economy and its armed hands reside, that the capitalist order can be smashed, when the flames ignited by the exploited of the planet set fire to the minds of their class brothers and sisters in the West.
Download PDF here
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