“When we are looking for an enemy, we often start by projecting ourselves on an abstract scene, in which the world has disappeared. Let us ask ourselves the same question, but starting from the neighbourhood where we live, from the company where we work, from the professional sector we are familiar with. Then the answer is clear; then the front lines can be distinctly seen, and who is on what side can easily be determined. This is because the question of the confrontation, the properly political question, only makes sense in a given world, in a substantial world. For those who are nowhere, cybernetic philosophers or metropolitan hipsters, the political question never makes sense.”
"There is a confrontation underlying this world. There is no need to be in Misrata today to perceive it. The streets of New York, for instance, reveal the extent to which this confrontation has been refined, for here we find all the sophisticated apparatuses needed to contain what is always threatening. Here is the mute violence that crushes down what still lives under the blocks of concrete and fake smiles. When we talk of ‘apparatuses’, we don’t only invoke the New York Police Department (NYPD) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), surveillance cameras and body scanners, guns and denunciation, anti- theft locks and cell phones.
Rather, in the layout of a town like New York the pinnacle of the global petit-organic-hipster-bourgeoisie we mean whatever captures intensities and vitalities in order to chew them up, digest them, and shit out value. But if capitalism triumphs every day, it is not merely because it crushes, exploits and represses, but also because it is desirable. This must be kept in mind when building a revolutionary movement.
There is a war going on a permanent, global civil war. Two things prevent us from understanding it or even from perceiving it. First, the denial of the very fact of confrontation is still a part of this confrontation. And second, despite all the new prose of the various geopolitical specialists, the meaning of this war is not understood. Everything said about the asymmetrical shape of the so-called ‘new wars’ only adds to the confusion. The ongoing war we speak of does not have the Napoleonic magnificence of regular wars between two great armies of men, or between two antagonistic classes. Because if there is an asymmetry in the confrontation it is less between the forces present than over the very definition of the war itself. That is why we cannot talk about a social war: for if social war is a war that is led against us, it cannot symmetrically describe the war that we wage from our side and vice versa. We have to rethink the words themselves in order to forge new concepts as weapons..."
Updated cover and US-Letter-sized formatting of a zine from a couple years ago.
Source: ill will editions
