WORLD WORLDWIDE BULGARIA News Journal Update - (en) Bulgaria, AB: The Invisible Committee: Power is logistics. Let's block everything! (ca, de, it, pt, tr) [machine translation]

 

Theory ---- The economy is not only what the strikers and demonstrators
are trying to block, it is primarily what the government intends to
awaken in everyone by raising the "specter of scarcity". The fear of
lack is the very basis of the economy in each of us. As long as we are
together, as long as we are connected, as long as we trust each other,
the fear of lack makes no sense. It exists only for rats. To really
block the economy, to block the economy in us, is to abandon the fear of
lack and not to fear that the present organization of life will be
broken. So far we have known only organized life, from here on we will
know living life. The one where strangers talk to each other on the
street and find a way to get things done when one or the other
encounters a problem; one where neighbors don't necessarily hate and spy
on each other; the one we're never in a hurry for again; the one from
which cars, supermarkets or iPhones will disappear without us even
noticing; the one where true wealth is tasted, for which no one is
greedy or jealous; the one, finally, that has form and meaning. Then
let's block everything! We have nothing to fear. We won't miss anything.
We will find ways to do it; and they will be beautiful. In any case,
they will be less mindless than the world we are forced to live in. No
barrier can stand against us: we are numerous and intelligent, and we
are the ones who make this world work. No government can do anything
against us as long as we no longer fear scarcity. Everything will be
fine. Incredibly peaceful. End of the economy.

This is perhaps what the Invisible Committee would say about the present
moment. Because we are reduced to imagining it.

Content
1. POWER resides now in the infrastructure
2. The difference between TO organize and TO organize
3. From the Blocking
4. From the investigation

POWER resides now in the infrastructure
Occupation of the Kasbah in Tunis, in Syntagma Square in Athens, at the
headquarters of Westminster in London during the student movement in
2011, surrounding the parliament in Madrid on 25 September 2012 or in
Barcelona on 15 June 2011, riots around the Chamber of Deputies in Rome
on December 14, 2010, an attempted invasion of the Assembleia da
República in Lisbon on October 15, 2011, a fire in the headquarters of
the Bosnian presidency in February 2014: places of institutional power
exert a magnetic pull on revolutionaries . But when insurgents manage to
storm parliaments, presidential palaces and other seats of institutions,
as in Ukraine, Libya or Wisconsin, then they find empty places, devoid
of power and tastelessly furnished. Not to prevent "the people" from
"taking the power" they are so fiercely forbidden to invade, but to
prevent them from realizing that power no longer resides in
institutions. There are only abandoned temples, abandoned fortresses,
simple decorations, which are real baits for revolutionaries. The
popular impulse to invade the scene to find out what goes on behind the
scenes is doomed to disappointment. Even the most ardent conspiracy
theorists, if they had access to power, would discover no secrets; the
truth is that it is the theatrical reality that modernity has accustomed
us to.

However, the truth about the effective disposition of power is not
hidden; only U.Swe refuse to see it as it would undermine our
comfortable security. You only have to look at the banknotes issued by
the European Union to see this truth. Neither Marxists nor neoclassical
economists have ever been able to admit it, but this is an
archaeologically established fact: money is not an economic tool, but
essentially a political reality. We have never seen a currency other
than that backed by a political order capable of guaranteeing it. That
is why the mottos of the various countries traditionally bear the
personal figures of emperors, great statesmen, founding fathers or the
allegories of the nation in flesh and blood. And what appears on euro
banknotes? No human figures, no signs of personal sovereignty, but
bridges, aqueducts, arches - impersonal architectures whose hearts are
empty. The truth is that of the present nature of power every European
has a printed copy in his pocket. It is phrased this way: power now
resides in the infrastructure of this world. Modern government is
architectural and impersonal in nature, not representative and personal.
Traditional power was representative: the Pope was the representative of
Christ on Earth, the King of God, the President of the People and the
General Secretary of the Party of the Proletariat. All this personal
politics is dead, and so the few tribunes that survive on the surface of
the globe entertain us more than they rule. The political staff is
actually made up of clowns of varying degrees of talent; hence the
stunning success of the clown Reagan in the USA or the French comedian
Dieudonné. In general, at least they know how to entertain you, that's
their job. Moreover, accusations against politicians that they "don't
represent us" other than pushing on an open door only feed the
nostalgia. Politicians are there to distract us as the power lies
elsewhere. And it is precisely this right intuition that runs amok in
all modern conspiracy theories. The power is elsewhere, not in the
institutions, but it is not hidden. Or if it is, it's like The Stolen
Letterof Poe. No one sees it because everyone has it in front of them at
all times - in the form of a power line, a highway, a roundabout, a
supermarket or a computer program. And if it's hidden, it's like a sewer
network, an undersea cable, an optical fiber running along a train line,
or a data center in the middle of a mountain. Power is the very
organization of this engineered, configured, engineered world. That's
the secret. Power is now inherent in life as it is organized
technologically and commercially. It has a neutral appearance of
equipment or Google white page. Who determines the layout of the space,
who manages the environment and atmosphere, who administers things, who
manages access, who manages people. Modern government has become the
heir of the old science of the police, which consists in ensuring the
"welfare and security of the citizens" on the one hand, on the other,
the heir of the logistical science of the military. The "art of moving
armies" has become the art of ensuring the continuity of communication
networks and strategic mobility. Clinging to our linguistic conception
of public affairs, of politics, we continued to argue while the real
decisions were being carried out before our eyes. Modern laws are
written in steel structures, not words. All the outrage of the citizens
could only be expressed through the collision of their stunned foreheads
into the reinforced concrete of this world. The great merit of the fight
against TAV (high-speed trains) in Italy is that everything that happens
in politics is understood with such clarity, reducing it to a simple
public project . "A construction site is worth as much as a battalion,"
estimated the great French marshal Liauteuil, who had no equal in the
"pacification" of the colonies. If everywhere in the world, from Romania
to Brazil, the struggles against big infrastructure projects are
growing, it is because this very intuition is about to take hold.

Whoever wants to take action against the existing world must start
there: the real power structure is the material, technological, physical
organization of this world. The government is no longer in the
government. The "vacuum of power" that lasted more than a year in
Belgium, which unequivocally testifies to this: the country managed to
manage without a government, without elected representatives, a
parliament, a political debate, an election fair, without affecting its
normal functioning. Similarly, Italy has been going from one "technical
government" to another "technical government" for years, and no one is
upset that this expression dates back to the 1918 Manifesto, the program
of the Futurist political party, which incubated the first fascists .

Power, henceforth, is the very order of things and the police
responsible for its protection. It is not easy to think of power as
consisting of infrastructures, the means of their management, control
and construction. How to challenge an order that cannot be formulated,
that is built step by step and without sentences. An order that has
become embedded in the very objects of everyday life. An order whose
political constitution is its material construction. An order that is
given not so much by the words of the president as by the silence of
optimal functioning. At a time when power was manifested through edicts,
laws and regulations, it left room for criticism. But we cannot
criticize a wall, we tear it down or mark it. A government that controls
life through its instruments and its arrangements, whose statements take
the form of a street littered with plots and overlooked by cameras, most
often calls for its destruction without words. The attack on the
framework of everyday life has become sacrilege: it is a kind of
violation of the constitution. The indiscriminate use of scrap metal in
urban riots reflects both an awareness of this state of affairs and a
relative powerlessness in the face of it. The tacit and unquestioned
order that materializes in the existence of a bus stop unfortunately
does not lie in pieces once it is broken. All the hypocritical
proclamations about the sacred nature of the "environment", the whole
holy crusade in its defense is illuminated by the light of this newness:
power itself has become ecological, it has melted into the decor. It is
she who is called to protect "environmental protection", not small fish.

The difference between DOING to organize and DOING to organize
Everyday life was not always organized . To do this, we first had to
take life apart, starting with the city. We divided life and the city
into functions according to "social needs". The office district, the
factory district, the residential district, the recreational areas, the
modern district where we have fun, the place where we eat, the place
where we work, the place where we flirt, and the car or the bus, are all
the result of work to shape life, which devastated all forms of life,
was carried out methodically, for more than a century, by a whole caste
of organizers, a whole gray armada of managers. We divided life and man
into a set of needs, then organized their synthesis. It does not matter
whether this synthesis is called "socialist planning" or "the market."
It doesn't matter if this led to the failure of new towns or the success
of modern neighborhoods. The result is the same: desert and existential
anemia. Nothing remains of the life form after it has been broken down
into organs. From there, conversely, comes the palpable joy that
overflowed from the occupied squares of Puerta del Sol, Tahrir, Gezi or
the attraction exerted, despite the infernal mud of the blockade of
Nantes, by the occupation of the lands of Notre-Dame-de-Land. Hence the
joy that every commune radiated. Suddenly life ceases to be divided into
connected parts. Sleeping, fighting, eating, healing, partying,
conspiring, debating are all part of a living movement. Not everything
is organized, everything has been organized . The difference is
remarkable. One requires management, the other attention - arrangements
incompatible at every point.

Reporting on the Aymara uprisings of the early 2000s in Bolivia, Raúl
Zibeci, a Uruguayan activist, wrote: "In these movements, organization
is not separated from the everyday, the everyday itself is what is
deployed in insurgent action." He notes that in El Alto's neighborhoods
in 2003, "the communal ethos replaced the old union ethos." Here's what
sheds light on what the fight against infrastructure power is all about.
Whoever says infrastructures is saying that life has been separated from
its conditions, that we have placed conditions on life, that it depends
on factors over which we no longer have any control. That we have lost
our footing. Infrastructures organize life without a world, suspended,
expendable, left at the mercy of whoever manages them. Metropolitan
nihilism is just a brave way of not admitting it, on the contrary, it
sheds light on what is being sought in the experiments that take place
in so many neighborhoods and villages around the world, and the
inevitable pitfalls. Not back to earth, but back on earth . What gives
insurgents their striking power, their ability to sustainably devastate
an adversary's infrastructure, is precisely their level of
self-organization of communal life. Whether one of Occupy Wall Street's
first instincts was to blockade the Brooklyn Bridge, or whether the
Oakland Commune set out to paralyze the city's harbor by a few thousand
during the December 12, 2011 general strike, demonstrates the intuitive
connection between self-organization and blockade . The fragility of
self-organization, which was barely taking shape in these professions,
should not have allowed these attempts to be continued. Conversely,
Tahrir and Taksim Squares are central hubs for car traffic in Cairo and
Istanbul. Blocking these flows meant opening up the situation. The
occupation is immediately blocked. Hence its ability to disrupt the
reign of normality in an entire metropolis, on a completely different
level, it is difficult not to make the connection between the fact that
the Zapatistas now propose to link together 29 defensive battles against
projects for mines, roads, power plants, dams, involving various
indigenous peoples from all over Mexico, and that they themselves have
spent the last ten years securing all possible means for their autonomy
in terms of federal authorities as well as economic.

 From the Blocking
A poster from the anti-CPE movement in France in 2006 said: "This world
is sustained by streams. Let's block everything!" This slogan, carried
at the time by a minority in the movement, also a minority, even if it
was "victorious", has enjoyed remarkable success ever since. In 2009,
the movement against "pwofitasyon" (the profit), which paralyzed all of
Guadeloupe, applied it in a big way. Then we saw that the practice of
blockade, during the French movement against the pension reform in the
autumn of 2010, became a practice of elementary struggle, applying it in
the same way against a fuel depot, a shopping center, a station or a
production site. This is what a certain state of the world reveals.

The fact that the French movement against pension reform was based on
the blockade of refineries is not a politically negligible fact. Since
the late 1970s, refineries have been the vanguard of what were then
called "process industries," "stream" industries. It can be said that
the operation of the refinery has served as a model for the
restructuring of most factories since then. Moreover, we should no
longer talk about factories, but about a site, production sites. The
difference between a factory and a site is that a factory is a
concentration of workers, know-how, raw materials, stocks; while the
site is simply a node on the production flow map. The only thing they
have in common is that what comes out of both has undergone some
transformation with respect to what went in. The refinery is where the
relationship between work and production was first turned upside down.
The worker, or rather the operator, is not even tasked with maintaining
and repairing the machines, which are usually entrusted to temporary
workers, but simply to deploy a certain vigilance around a fully
automated production process. It's a light that comes on and it
shouldn't. This is an unusual bubbling in a sewer. This is smoke that
comes out weird or doesn't look right. The refinery worker is something
of a machine watchman, an idle figure with nervous concentration. And
this is the trend in many industrial sectors in the West now. The
classical worker was magnificently assimilated to the Producer: here the
relation between work and production is simply reversed. There is work
only when production is stopped, when a malfunction prevents it and
needs to be fixed. Marxists can undress: the process of valorization of
the commodity, from extraction to the pump, coincides with the process
of circulation, which in turn coincides with the process of production,
which, moreover, depends in real time on the final fluctuations of the
market. The claim that the value of the commodity crystallizes from the
labor time of the worker was a political operation as fruitful as it was
false. In a refinery, as in any fully automated factory, this has become
a mark of insulting irony. Give China another ten years, ten years of
workers' strikes and demands, and it will be the same. We will not
overlook the fact that refinery workers have long been among the best
paid in industry, and that it was in this sector that what we
euphemistically call the "fluidification of social relations"
experienced for the first time, at least in France, more especially the
trade union ones.

During the movement against the pension reform, most of the fuel depots
in France were blockaded not by their few workers, but by teachers,
students, drivers, railway workers, postal workers, unemployed, high
school students. This does not mean that these workers were not entitled
to it. It only means that in a world where the organization of
production is decentralized, circular and largely automated, where each
machine is nothing more than a unit in an integrated system of machines
that includes it, where this world system of machines that produce
machines tends to be cybernetically unified, each individual flow a
moment of the overall reproduction of capital society. There is no
longer a 'sphere of reproduction', of labor power and of all social
relations, that is distinct from the 'sphere of production'. The latter
is no longer a sphere, but rather the framework of the world and all
relationships. To physically attack these flows, at any point, is to
politically attack the system as a whole. If the subject of the strike
was the working class, that of the blockade is quite ordinary. Anyone
who decides to block - thus stands against the current organization of
the world.

Civilizations often collapse when they reach their maximum level of
complexity. Each production chain extends to such a level of
specialization for such a number of intermediaries that it is enough for
only one of them to disappear and the entire chain is paralyzed or
destroyed. Honda plants in Japan three years ago suffered their longest
periods of inactivity since the 1960s, simply because the supplier of a
particular chip disappeared in the March 2011 earthquake and there was
no one else to make that chip.

In this mania for blocking everything that now accompanies every great
movement, we must read clearly the reversal of the relationship with
time. We look to the future as Walter Benjamin's Angel of History looked
to the past. "Where we see a chain of events, he sees only one and only
catastrophe, continually piling ruins upon ruins and throwing them at
his feet." The passing of time is already perceived as a slow
progression towards a possibly dire end. Each succeeding decade is seen
as a further step towards the climate chaos that everyone has come to
understand as the grim "global warming" truth. Heavy metals will
continue to accumulate daily in the food chain, as will radioactive
nuclides and so many other invisible but fatal pollutants. We must also
see every attempt to block the global system, every movement, every
rebellion, every uprising as a vertical attempt to stop time and deviate
in a less fatal direction.

 From the investigation
It is not the weakness of the struggles that explains the disappearance
of any revolutionary prospect; on the contrary: the absence of a
reliable revolutionary perspective is what explains the weakness of the
struggles. However obsessed we are with the political idea of
revolution,we neglected its technical dimension. The revolutionary
perspective no longer rests on the institutional reorganization of
society, but on the technical configuration of worlds . As such, it is a
line drawn in the present, not an image floating in the future. If we
want to regain perspective, we will have to combine the conclusion that
this world can no longer survive with the desire to build a better one.
For if this world is maintained, it is primarily through material
dependence, where everyone, for their simple survival, is face to face
with the general functioning of the social machine. We must have a
thorough technical knowledge of the organization of this world; a
knowledge that allows both to discard the dominant structures and to
preserve the necessary time to organize the material and political
detachment from the general course of the catastrophe, a detachment that
is not haunted by the specter of scarcity, by the urgency of survival.
To put it bluntly:until we know how to do without nuclear power plants
and that dismantling them will be a business for those who want them to
be eternal, the drive to abolish the state will continue to smile at us;
while the prospect of a popular uprising means some shortage of health
care, food or energy, there will be no decisive mass movement.In other
words: we must resume the meticulous investigative work. We must meet in
all sectors, at all levels and territories where we live, those who have
strategic technical knowledge. Only then will the movements really dare
to "block everything". Only from there will the passion for
experimenting with another way of life be released, a technical passion
that is, to a large extent, like reversing everyone's technological
dependence.This process of accumulating knowledge, of establishing
complicity in all areas, is the condition for a serious and mass return
to the revolutionary question.

" The labor movement was not defeated by capitalism, but by democracy,"
says Mario Tronti. It was also defeated because it failed to capture the
bulk of the workers' power. What makes the laborer a laborer is not his
exploitation by the patron, which he shares with every other wage-slave.
What makes a worker positive is his technical mastery embodied in a
particular sector of production. Here is an inclination which is both
scientific and popular, a passionate knowledge which was the wealth of
the working world before capital realized the danger involved in it, and
not without first sucking up all knowledge , deciding to make the
workers, operators, supervisors and maintenance workers of the machines.
But even then the power of the workers remains:whoever knows how to make
a system work knows how to sabotage it effectively. But, no one can
individually master all the techniques that allow the current system to
reproduce. Only collective power can do it. The building of a
revolutionary force today is just that: to articulate all the necessary
revolutionary techniques, to unite all the technical intelligence in one
historical force, not in one system of government.

The failure of the French movement in the fight against the pension
reform in the autumn of 2010 taught us a bitter lesson: if the CGT had
the upper hand in the whole struggle, it was due to our inadequacy in
this respect. It was enough for the movement to block the refineries, a
sector in which it was hegemon, making it its center of gravity. It was
then free at any time to signal the end of the game by reopening the
refinery valves and thereby relieving any pressure on the country. What
the movement lacked was just a minimal knowledge of the material
workings of this world, a knowledge that turned out to be scattered in
the hands of the workers, concentrated in the heads of a few engineers,
and certainly shared on the opposite side with some dark military
instance. If we had been able to stop the police from firing tear gas,
or if we had been able to stop the television propaganda for a day, if
we had been able to deprive the authorities of electricity, we can be
sure that things would not have turned out so badly. We must consider
that the main political defeat of the movement was in abandoning the
state, in the form of prefectural authorities, the strategic prerogative
to determine who will have gasoline and who will be deprived of it.
Returning from the realm of clouds to earth, for starters, means no
longer living in ignorance of the conditions of our existence.

" If you want to get rid of someone today, you have to attack their
infrastructure", rightly writes an American university professor. After
World War II, the US Air Force continued to develop the idea of
"infrastructure warfare," seeing in the most ordinary civilian equipment
the best targets for bringing adversaries to their knees. This also
explains why the strategic infrastructures of this world are surrounded
by increasing secrecy. There is no point in a revolutionary power
knowing how to block an adversary's infrastructure if it does not know
how to make it work to its advantage if necessary. Knowing how to
disrupt the technological system requires experimentation while also
applying techniques that make it redundant.

The text is part of the book "To our friends", which we presented in
"Free Thought" in 2018 . The entire book can be read here .

https://anarchism.espivblogs.net/2024/01/05/gia-ton-atomikismo-mia-epistoli-ston-max-netlaoy/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca