First of all, great piece! “It’s a problem that arises from a lack of strategy, a lack of critical evaluation of past experiences”. It is indeed very important that each of us reflects on this and then keeps on discusses this with others. So a lot of respect to you for taking the time to write this elaborate, qualitative piece on it.
In addition to the first reply, some further reflections on the ‘why?’… Not because it was absent in your text or I feel that you neglected it (because you didn’t, you just stretched the point to also articulate the ‘how?’), but because, it can give some more substantive depth to it and further keeps the discussion alive… Some of these reflections weren’t given to me at birth, but came from paper bundles they call books. For the simple reason people might also want to read them and learn from them, I included authors and titles (So don’t get frightened by the threat of pseudo-intellectual exclamations).
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>>The demo and why we were there….
People differed in their motivations to go to the 1st of may demo but one can assume that most of us stood there as opponents of the current system that presents itself as the logical order of things and tries to manipulate us into believing that the status-quo stands for the best of all possible worlds. The dominance of Neoliberal paradigms inside our current political, economic and cultural formations brought a massive increase in social and economic inequality, a marked increase in severe deprivation for the poorest nations and peoples of the world, a disastrous global environment, an unstable global economy, and an unprecedented bonanza for the wealthy (McChesney 1999; link to this great text: http://www.chomsky.info/onchomsky/19990401.htm). So most of us stood there for exactly the reasons stated in the message below;
“We want to live in a free world in which you are not judged on productivity and how much you adapt to this system. a world in which people are not obstructed by borders, authorities and capital. A world in which we are not numbers, and in which the circus of school, work and consuming until death does no longer exist. A world of solidarity, in which people are more important than profit and power.” (texts from after the demo http://ourmediaindymedia.blogspot.com/2012/05/text-regarding-first-of-ma...)
But is it an important fact that for most of the demonstrating people, including myself, these reasons are not always clearly articulated in the heads; readily there as provocative verbal bullets when charged with the question ‘why are you here?’. That doesn’t mean most of us stood there as random tourist, sniffing the air with accidental lingering curiosity. That also doesn’t mean that our believes and convictions are fragile. It rather points to the hesitative inhibition we experience for exclaiming big truths, grand narratives we will stand for while excluding others. We linger peacefully… and then we get beaten. We get beaten by ‘civil servants’, whose private moral consciousness is reduced to zero, who are voluntary enslaved to protect the safety in Bea’s realm. Safety being nothing more than an modernist deception in a direct relationship with the persistent attacks on individual freedom. But the important thing here is that events like that don’t leave us behind as beaten dogs, weeping for the shattered pieces of our ideologies…. On the contrary, they force us to articulate more clearly what was lingering before. So evens like the first of may, and other recent examples, bring us two very important things: first, the clearness of the need to organize the how and the energy to do this. Second; the articulation, and in the same move the embodiment, of the why. And as has been said in both of the messages before, they operate together; together the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ are of great power.
>>The why of violence…
This question is not about using violence or not. In my opinion, that is never the question; it only distract from discussing what is really at stake. The why of violence is subordinated to the why people are actually there on that demo. It involves acting out what you believe in and implies you as a moral subject. The question of violence is not one of self-defense, strategy or public statement. These are all involved and important. But, they are not the main answer to this ‘why’. The why has to do with the same drive you went to that demo, albeit maybe not yet clearly articulated; it serves our ideologies and the persons that embody them. Of course you’ll have to fight for your believes if acting-out them out gets hindered and repressed by the same fucking system you are opposing to.
An important fact is that the coupling of violence to abnormality and criminality serves to overshadow the normalised, legitimized and structural violence, done in the name of ‘The Good’ by the state. Bakunin said this in quite a more elegant manner:
“The State is authority; it is force; it is the ostentation and infatuation of force: it does not insinuate itself; it does not seek to convert. . . . Even when it commands what is good, it hinders and spoils it, just because it commands it, and because every command provokes and excites the legitimate revolts of liberty; and because the good, from the moment that it is commanded, becomes evil from the point of view of true morality, of human morality (doubtless not of divine), from the point of view of human respect and of liberty. Liberty, morality, and the human dignity of man consist precisely in this, that he does good, not because it is commanded, but because he conceives it, wills it and loves it”. (Bakunin in the book ‘Proposed roads to freedom’ van B. Russell. An online version of this chapter to be found here; http://www.personal.kent.edu/~rmuhamma/Philosophy/RBwritings/ProposedRdF...)
The question of why comes down to acting out what you believe in and by that you gain your freedom.
One last quote to end… “There is this little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed”(John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath 1939), and therefore I cannot help but walking around these days with this strange satiating sentiment of optimism…
Some Reflections on the ‘Why?’…
First of all, great piece! “It’s a problem that arises from a lack of strategy, a lack of critical evaluation of past experiences”. It is indeed very important that each of us reflects on this and then keeps on discusses this with others. So a lot of respect to you for taking the time to write this elaborate, qualitative piece on it.
In addition to the first reply, some further reflections on the ‘why?’… Not because it was absent in your text or I feel that you neglected it (because you didn’t, you just stretched the point to also articulate the ‘how?’), but because, it can give some more substantive depth to it and further keeps the discussion alive… Some of these reflections weren’t given to me at birth, but came from paper bundles they call books. For the simple reason people might also want to read them and learn from them, I included authors and titles (So don’t get frightened by the threat of pseudo-intellectual exclamations).
--
>>The demo and why we were there….
People differed in their motivations to go to the 1st of may demo but one can assume that most of us stood there as opponents of the current system that presents itself as the logical order of things and tries to manipulate us into believing that the status-quo stands for the best of all possible worlds. The dominance of Neoliberal paradigms inside our current political, economic and cultural formations brought a massive increase in social and economic inequality, a marked increase in severe deprivation for the poorest nations and peoples of the world, a disastrous global environment, an unstable global economy, and an unprecedented bonanza for the wealthy (McChesney 1999; link to this great text: http://www.chomsky.info/onchomsky/19990401.htm). So most of us stood there for exactly the reasons stated in the message below;
“We want to live in a free world in which you are not judged on productivity and how much you adapt to this system. a world in which people are not obstructed by borders, authorities and capital. A world in which we are not numbers, and in which the circus of school, work and consuming until death does no longer exist. A world of solidarity, in which people are more important than profit and power.” (texts from after the demo http://ourmediaindymedia.blogspot.com/2012/05/text-regarding-first-of-ma...)
But is it an important fact that for most of the demonstrating people, including myself, these reasons are not always clearly articulated in the heads; readily there as provocative verbal bullets when charged with the question ‘why are you here?’. That doesn’t mean most of us stood there as random tourist, sniffing the air with accidental lingering curiosity. That also doesn’t mean that our believes and convictions are fragile. It rather points to the hesitative inhibition we experience for exclaiming big truths, grand narratives we will stand for while excluding others. We linger peacefully… and then we get beaten. We get beaten by ‘civil servants’, whose private moral consciousness is reduced to zero, who are voluntary enslaved to protect the safety in Bea’s realm. Safety being nothing more than an modernist deception in a direct relationship with the persistent attacks on individual freedom. But the important thing here is that events like that don’t leave us behind as beaten dogs, weeping for the shattered pieces of our ideologies…. On the contrary, they force us to articulate more clearly what was lingering before. So evens like the first of may, and other recent examples, bring us two very important things: first, the clearness of the need to organize the how and the energy to do this. Second; the articulation, and in the same move the embodiment, of the why. And as has been said in both of the messages before, they operate together; together the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ are of great power.
>>The why of violence…
This question is not about using violence or not. In my opinion, that is never the question; it only distract from discussing what is really at stake. The why of violence is subordinated to the why people are actually there on that demo. It involves acting out what you believe in and implies you as a moral subject. The question of violence is not one of self-defense, strategy or public statement. These are all involved and important. But, they are not the main answer to this ‘why’. The why has to do with the same drive you went to that demo, albeit maybe not yet clearly articulated; it serves our ideologies and the persons that embody them. Of course you’ll have to fight for your believes if acting-out them out gets hindered and repressed by the same fucking system you are opposing to.
An important fact is that the coupling of violence to abnormality and criminality serves to overshadow the normalised, legitimized and structural violence, done in the name of ‘The Good’ by the state. Bakunin said this in quite a more elegant manner:
“The State is authority; it is force; it is the ostentation and infatuation of force: it does not insinuate itself; it does not seek to convert. . . . Even when it commands what is good, it hinders and spoils it, just because it commands it, and because every command provokes and excites the legitimate revolts of liberty; and because the good, from the moment that it is commanded, becomes evil from the point of view of true morality, of human morality (doubtless not of divine), from the point of view of human respect and of liberty. Liberty, morality, and the human dignity of man consist precisely in this, that he does good, not because it is commanded, but because he conceives it, wills it and loves it”. (Bakunin in the book ‘Proposed roads to freedom’ van B. Russell. An online version of this chapter to be found here; http://www.personal.kent.edu/~rmuhamma/Philosophy/RBwritings/ProposedRdF...)
The question of why comes down to acting out what you believe in and by that you gain your freedom.
One last quote to end… “There is this little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed”(John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath 1939), and therefore I cannot help but walking around these days with this strange satiating sentiment of optimism…