Subversive bookfair in Brussels

The revolutionary question is a clear line of rupture in the heart of the international anarchist movement, in some places it cuts deeper than in others. On the one hand there is THE revolution, the mirror image of a faraway oasis, which will kill us of thirst in the desert before reaching it in some concrete form. This vision regards revolution as an event to quietly expect, because it anyhow doesn’t depend on our actions, but depends fully on the awakening of the masses. This kind of revolutionaries never regard the circumstances as right for revolution, and view all sort of attacks that are not “massive” as the product of an out of place impatience and an avant-gardism that puts itself in words as well as in deeds in the place of the true revolutionary subjects, which are not revolutionaries…

On the other side there is the basic anti-revolutionism which denounces the revolutionaries by stating that they are only waiting, tempering with the revolt, stopping those which wish to live anarchy here and now. The revolution as a concrete event is in a certain way a miracle on which one hopes, but which will never take place, a faraway paradise.

 

Unfortunately, due to the era in which we are living, there are apocalyptic, even chiliastic perspectives developed from all sides, and contrary to the faraway past, these perspectives are not only to be found back in the midst of mystics, conspirators or religious fanatics. Today the question of “the end of the world” is haunting the discussions in a more or less serious way. The end of the world in 2012, judgement day, the return of the messiah, the third eye and other mystic religious crap is competing on the eschatological stage with the frightening perspective of a nuclear Holocaust or a complete world- or civil war. But somewhere on this stage, there is the idea walking around that the system will collapse out of itself, under the weight of its abuses. The unavoidable collapse of capitalism by the Marxist revisited at the edge of the 21^st century and its economic, social and ecological “crises”. A hypothetical collapse accompanied by hope for it as well as by fear. Off course, this hypothesis seems little serious to me, seen the fact that capitalism progresses through its history from crisis to crisis, each time strengthened, reform after reform.

 

This vision on the revolution which is set into action on its own, without us, without me and in a certain way under the impulse of the self-destructive old world, offers nothing but the immediate perspective of sitting and waiting for it. The projection of our desires into an unavoidable future enables us to accept the existent in an easier way. And if Marx’ belief in the unavoidability of communism lead him, him and his disciples, to regard industrialisation and capitalist exploitation as necessary steps towards the introduction of communism; the ideology of the unavoidable collapse ends forcibly justifying the praxis carried out as “a social self-defence”, an answer against the state. Furthermore it validates the escape from the reality that we are facing on a daily basis in a very concretely.

 

Of course, this vision on the old world which would collapse under its own weight makes the insurrectional necessity redundant, making place for nothing but expectancy, defence. In one way, this will concretise itself in, to use a fashionable term, “social self-defence” (squats, scenes, lifestyles, community, survival…), or through a reactionary preservation of “the planet” to facilitate a return towards a previous condition (but which one?), or again somewhere else one will specialize in the defence of the “indigenous people” or in anti-repression projects, uniquely conditioned by the enemy, and so on. In any case there is no need whatsoever to attack the State or capitalist structures, or the mechanisms of domination which define human relationships, since they propel towards the collapse, as by magic.

 

In the end, these extremely prickly debates about the partisans of the unavoidable collapse of the system don’t really interest me, whether it they are “communisateurs”¹ or anarchists. This is to say, whatever its conclusion may be, it will not change my point of view. If capitalism truly must collapse on its own, it has no influence on the fact that I will in no way await this event in a patient way, continue to suffer this miserable mediocre life offered by this expectation.

 

I am an anarchist and a revolutionary, but I do not believe that THE revolution will take place, not today nor tomorrow. Yet, I strive towards the revolution, that is to say I strive towards directing my actions and my thoughts towards a total subversion of this world, and a total rupture with the past. This is how I am revolutionary, not out of opportunism, and I think there is nothing worse than those who say they are revolutionary because they are animated by the belief that they will still live the revolution as a concrete event. No, being revolutionary means one plants the seeds of another world inside his concrete activities and theoretical production, so that the means and the ends coincide.

 

We cannot deny that our life as well as the condition of the current world is horrible. De facto, seen the current condition of humankind, a radical subversion freeing this world from all authority seems almost unimaginable to me. We can even affirm that today the perspective of a generalized insurrection contains as much hope as fear. In a world in which the rancid ideologies such as racism, the identitarian and communautarists mechanisms, the thirst for power, the greed for money, the consumerism, the economic or social competition or the sexism are devouring each other, we can state that the insurrection, next to the elements in which we can recognize ourselves and can join in, will as well contain a bunch of tragic and unbearable events with it.

 

This being said, it seems to me even more unsuited and estranged from reality to talk about an anarchist revolution. Because this would implicate the imagination of a revolution of millions of anarchists, in some way the old dream of the CNT, which, if respectable on the level of the dream, one cannot use a pipe dream as a pretext for passivity and expectation. If there is a revolution or an insurrection, the anarchists will not be standing on the sidelines, that’s for sure. Trying to pull the events towards a criticism on authority in itself, to push aside the negative impulses belonging to this world without playing the role of the cops, but as well to give pleasure to oneself in satisfying the desire for revenge which has been accumulating blow after blow, a revenge towards the state and the economy as well as towards the society.

 

So according to me, being revolutionary signifies being driven by a tension towards something else. A tension that becomes concrete here and now, every day, in the smallest deed of war. It is the projectual interweaving in every deed, even the most insignificant, which is carried by the revolutionary, dedicated to the identification of this world as being an obstacle towards the revolutionary project. In a way it is a responsibility as well, because it seems unavoidable to me that one puts himself at risk in the struggle. To openly declare oneself a revolutionary brings about its share of risks and dangers. We cannot expect that society, after having openly declared our conflict against it, will in turn not take its revenge on us, by means of the state repression or otherwise. Exactly as it is in life, these issues are much more subtle than such simplistic formulas.

 

So this world, far from the point of destroying itself, must be destroyed, this is the oeuvre of the revolutionary, it cannot be avoided. As someone else already said, if the question is not about “making the revolution”, it will be about “how to avoid it?”.

 

Another revolutionary without revolution