mooncakeSince finishing live-tooting The Conquest Of Bread, I feel like I should do another book that’s on The Anarchist Library. Maybe leap ahead and do “To Our Friends” by the Invisible Committee?
I mean here we go!
https://anticapitalist.party/media/wGxMeEKwof12LMHWnRI
https://anticapitalist.party/media/9E-A831GMYiSrqvaPKo
https://anticapitalist.party/media/wGxMeEKwof12LMHWnRI
https://anticapitalist.party/media/9E-A831GMYiSrqvaPKo
This essay is available as a PDF online but I’m reading a book version (as pictured above) but anyways!
https://anticapitalist.party/media/N9Hdq-MnLTV5M4tjGJw
https://anticapitalist.party/media/N9Hdq-MnLTV5M4tjGJw
"In reality, the end of civilization has been clinically established for a century, and countersigned by events... the catastrophe there in front of us, and that has been there for a long time, from the catastrophe that we are, the catastrophe that the West is. That catastrophe is existential, affective, and metaphysical first of all. It resides in Western man’s incredible estrangement from the world, an estrangement that demands, for example, that he become the master and possessor of nature."
"The falsity of the entire Western apocalyptic consists in projecting onto the world the mourning we’re not able to do in regard to it. It’s not the world that is lost, it’s we who have lost the world and go on losing it. It’s not the world that is going to end soon, it’s we who are finished, amputated, cut-off, we who refuse vital contact with the real in a hallucinatory way. The crisis is not economic, ecological, or political, <i> the crisis is above all that of presence </i>."
"Man has even proclaimed himself a 'geological force' ... For the last time, he assigns himself the main role, even if it’s to accuse himself of having trashed everything—the seas and the skies, the ground and what’s underground... What’s remarkable is that he continues relating in the same disastrous manner to the disaster produced by his own disastrous relationship with the world."
^this bit about the anthropocene is fascinating to me because I know that "capitalocene" is a little more ~acceptable~ in certain circles
Makes me think of Donna Haraway's recent works : http://environmentalhumanities.org/arch/vol6/6.7.pdf
"He has the hubris to claim, paternally, to be 'protecting the environment,' which certainly never asked for anything of the sort. All this has the look of a last bold move in a game that can’t be won."
This makes me think about how conservation efforts are almost always framed in terms of biodiversity and survival but ofc whose survival blah blah blah
"If so much satisfaction is derived from surveying the devastation of the environment it’s largely because this veils the shocking destruction of interiorities. Every oil spill, every sterile plain, every species extinction is an image of our souls in shreds, a reflection of our absence from the world, of our personal inability to inhabit it."
"We other revolutionaries, with our atavistic humanism, would do well to inform ourselves about the uninterrupted uprisings by the indigenous peoples of Central and South America over the past twenty years. Their watchword could be “Place the earth at the center.” It’s a declaration of war against Man. Declaring war on him could be the best way to bring him back down to earth, if only he didn’t play deaf, as always."
"Nothing is older than the end of the world. The apocalyptic passion has always been favored by the powerless since earliest antiquity. What is new in our epoch is that the apocalyptic has been totally absorbed by capital, and placed in its service. The horizon of catastrophe is what we are currently being governed by."
"The decomposition of this world, taken on as such, creates openings for other ways of living, including in the middle of an 'emergency situation.' Consider the inhabitants of Mexico City in 1985... In the euphoria of regaining control of their urban existence, they conflated the collapse of buildings with a breakdown of the political system, releasing the life of the city from the grip of government as much as possible and starting to rebuild their destroyed dwellings."
When I think about how this can be applied to my own life and organizing, I think about how much I don't want things to get to a crisis for new communities and ways of living/thriving to exist, but to build the networks early, preventative stuff in the case of earthquakes, idk
"Faced with the Western catastrophe, the left generally adopts the position of lamentation, denunciation, and thus helplessness, which makes it loathsome in the eyes of the very ones it claims to be defending. The state of exception in which we are living shouldn’t be denounced, it should be turned back against power itself.
...
For us there is now only a historical battlefield, and the forces that move upon it. Our range of action is boundless. Historical life extends her arms to us."
"It’s not the people that produce an uprising, it’s the uprising that produces its people, by re-engendering the shared experience and understanding, the human fabric and the real-life language that had disappeared. Revolutions of the past promised a new life. Contemporary insurrections deliver the keys to it...
There is where the event resides: not in the media phenomenon fabricated to exploit the rebellion through external celebration of it, but in the encounters actually produced within it"
"In contemporary insurrections there is something that especially unsettles the revolutionaries: the insurrections no longer base themselves on political ideologies, but on ethical truths...
A truth, we were taught, is a solid point above the abyss—a statement that adequately describes the World... Far from serving to describe the world, language helps us rather to construct a world. Ethical truths are thus not truths about the world, but truths on the basis of which we dwell therein."
I wonder about this. Truth. Ethical truths. I think that in practice I agree. Based on what I have learned in demos and occupations, this is true. But I am curious about the overlap/feedback loop/connection between ethical truths AND political ideologies.
I don't have any answers or even any arguments to make about this but I'm interested in it. But also truth as a philosophical concept kind of bores me (it might be bc I'm not well-versed in The Debates)
"Truths are what bind us, to ourselves, to the world around us, and to each other... If earthlings are prepared to risk their lives to prevent a square from being transformed into a parking lot as at Gamonal in Spain, a park from becoming a shopping center as at Gezi in Turkey, woods from becoming an airport as at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, it’s clearly because what we love, what we are attached to—beings, places, or ideas—is also part of us"
"The true content of Occupy Wall Street was not the demand, tacked onto the movement a posteriori like a post-it stuck on a hippopotamus, for better wages, decent housing, or a more generous social security, but disgust with the life we’re forced to live. Disgust with a life in which we’re all alone, alone facing the necessity for each one to make a living, house oneself, feed oneself, realize one’s potential, and attend to one’s health, by oneself."
*sighs*
There are a lot of italics in this book that I can't always mark because I've run out of character space for <i></i>
There's a bit where the book talks about austerity and anti-austerity measures and I'm not quite sure what to make of it! I will have to sit with this one a lot I think.
"As for the pacifism that is associated so naturally with the idea of democracy, we should hear what the Cairo comrades say about that as well: 'Those who say that the Egyptian revolution was peaceful did not see the horrors that the police visited upon us, nor did they see the resistance and even the force that revolutionaries used against the police to defend their tentative occupations and spaces.'"
WHEWWWWWWWWWW 
🎉
I think one of my favorite things about this book/essay/letter is how it uses examples from across the entire world - the emphasis is on moments of insurrection, rebellion, or “new ways of existing with each other” (that’s me paraphrasing), which are, in certain ways, “universal”*
*even so, “universal” as a qualifier is dangerous Sticky ground to be treading into. But! Still something to think about
This book is really really fascinating and good, and is resonating with me as a person who feels hopeless, close to burnout, cynical, etc
The CrimeThinc zine “We Are All Very Anxious” made me feel similarly. For some reason these writings give me more of an affective response than “classical” anarchist theory (which I still love and delight in!).
I don’t like feeling like this but for some reason, To Our Friends makes it slightly more bearable lol
algorithm approved@mooncake
is this the book? I'm interested in reading it
http://libgen.io/book/index.php?md5=7A27159EBAC10CB66FE04C8CD2248A22
is this the book? I'm interested in reading it
http://libgen.io/book/index.php?md5=7A27159EBAC10CB66FE04C8CD2248A22
@Odonian yep! That’s the one! It’s also available on the Anarchist Library (scroll up in the thread)
@mooncake oh sorry i didn't notice the previous toots in the thread. thanks!