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I've just noticed that one of the Monsieur Dupont articles I linked to above contains a bit of critique of lifestylism. I still rather like it as a piece of writing, even though I don't agree with everything they say. Here's the link again - Diz, there's some good criticism of the idiot brand of 'serious' anarchism that has unfortunately characterised your experience.
I'm going to quote one part here, if only to show that Bey and co. don't have a monopoly on imaginative metaphor in the midst of political critique! They are comparing contemporary capitalism to a motorway...
The parable is also the paradigm. Isn't driving your car on a motorway a bit like making love to a beautiful woman?
A bit like shopping, a bit like a maternity ward, a bit like filling in forms, a bit like education?
The motorway is a sophisticated conveyor belt, a factory process that produces both destination and a high velocity turnover of packaged units all done up in their cars like unique and expensive chocolates. A bit like eating, a bit like having an operation, a bit like emotions and stupid political solutions? A bit like dying, a bit like clicking on your mouse, a bit like the fall of civilisations, a bit like reading novels? Appearing here, ending there, distance and the time to cover that distance. Hold-ups, contra-flows, accident blackspots, tail-backs.
It seems you can and you cannot travel the same motorway twice.
All the movement and the events borne of movement: disease, ideas, accidents, disasters, military manoeuvres, and money (always money), getting to work, to the out of town, off on our hols, the products rolling off the line, the waste products dragged off to the dump, all that and the motorway itself untouched, ever present like a black angel's roar, like money washing over us; everything is integrated into the economy as a commodity, even our underpants. The motorway is the site of movement, just as the factory is the site of production, from a single of its products you may deduce the capitalist economy, from one car you will understand distribution.
The motorway does not move but gives form to every possible movement from the smooth flow to the grinding snarl-up.
Moving and non-movement, the motorway conditions all possible phenomena even that which reflects critically upon it (anti-globalisers hop on aeroplanes to attend far away conferences against aeroplanes, but to travel by mule would be mere conceit). Yes you may alter your car, reform it, change it for another, try alternative fuels, you can transform your driving habits, you can pledge yourself to the cause of safety; at the level of your ownership you are free to do anything, but.... nothing of what you choose has any significance to anyone but yourself, all choices are conditioned. And ethical choices, even if they are shared with a number of others remain at the level of ethics, there is no true organisation in it, it is not a politics, it can have no impact on the nature of the motorway.
The rules for the road are set by the road and not its users, there is imposition not consensus.
The conditioned response, the effect, the result cannot reach round and alter the forces determining its presence or its character. The road drives your car, it's in your unconscious, you can't turn it off, you hear it on the other side of the hill, rubber spinning water. Nobody can stop it because nobody chose it, it is a fact, the world we live in. In the same way a television programme critical of the psycho-sociological effects of television ultimately ends by affirming the amazing versatility of the medium, it certainly cannot turn the box off and release people to do something less boring instead. Television and the motorway, unlike the Roman Emperors, tolerate, even encourage, dissent.
Outside the metaphor anarchists can refuse details and go on demonstrations, they can change their life, they can try to will the future into existence, they can go vegan, they can develop viable alternatives, can proclaim themselves against burger bars and coffee shops, they can develop green, organic, co-operative ventures. They can attempt to control every detail of their life and make it as alternative as is possible but the system itself remains out of reach, capital is untouched. When they're saving the environment by recycling their rubbish someone else is making a profit from their unpaid labour. When they're printing leaflets and shouting slogans for the holy cause someone less scrupulous and more organised is turning that to their political advantage.
Within the metaphor, anarchists can disrupt local traffic with their critical masses, they can park their cars on the hard shoulder and go and find themselves in the adjacent field of sugarbeet, nobody notices the sparks that fly off into the dark periphery. They can drive their tractors slowly, they can hold parties on the tarmac, they can dig up chunks of what they hate, they can make other drivers feel very, very annoyed by their pranks and provocations. But all of this is second level voluntarism (I am determined by the road therefore I rebel against the road), it is not deep down structural, it's at the level of 'Starbucks bad, Fairtrade good', it's secondary and not right in there, touching the heart of it. The best second level structure for political reflection on economic forces is democracy, but at all times in its history democracy has shown itself to be controlled by and not in control of, the economy. Those 'anarchists' advocating municipalism and 'real' democracy should take note of this failure. |
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