Position Paper 1
‘We want to work not on the spectacle of the end of the world, but on the end of the world of the spectacle’[i]
The events of September 11th 2001 are being used to argue that the movement against capitalism and for humanity no longer has a place in a world whose leaders have returned to the serenity of simple polarization. Since the fall of the other great and semi-mythical opposition to US hegemony the Soviet Union, there has been talk of the ‘end of history’ and the triumph of liberal democracy. In practice, this amounts to a celebration of a system where the economy has been enthroned as monarch, a monarch with supreme powers that are diffused through the ‘normal’ processes, organisations and institutions that are constructing the project of life for us. A system where opposition, adventure and beauty are crushed beneath the heel of the market place, and the cold steel of weaponry – ideological, mundane or military.
Without the luxury of an enemy however, or with enemies everywhere it goes, this process, this boot repeatedly stamping on a face forever has come sharply into focus. Consequently, many people have travelled from critiques of environmental degradation through to issues of corporate power, the imposition of debt and the expansion of free trade, all the time with a growing awareness that something more fundamental is at issue. We are occupied by the economy, which works because we work, not for the most part to provide for our needs or to nurture our communities, but instead to produce and above all to consume things - good stats, smart phones and weapons, cars, action figures and terrorists. These things (commodities – real or virtual) in turn work to produce us, through their production and exchange they mediate between us, they become the things we need, the things we desire, they constitute who we can and can’t be, what prestige we have and haven’t got access to, how cool/hot we are. They become crucial to our image of ourselves, crucial then, in a world of images to ourselves, and all the time there must be more of them. The economy must grow, there must always be more, smarter cards, phones and bombs, action figures with everything and terrorists everywhere we look. More work to be done, creating the illusion of more value which is ultimately represented as money, the means through which the exchange of things is permitted and accounted for and of course the market-mechanism for the accumulation of more things … more power and less life.
This then is the world of the spectacle, a vision of a life stolen from us and replayed endlessly as an unending set of unrealisable possibilities premised on our own alienation. A world where we experience life as if detached from it, as if living to be seen to be living, working hard, struggling, never having enough time, watching ourselves from afar, auto-voyeurs of everyday life. Even, whilst all the time the bureaucracy of this process and the ceaseless quest to enclose more of life within this circuitry of endless commodity production and control relations has become more visible. Invading as it has the very material fabric of life: the production of food and the patenting of staple diets, the costing of access to water and the biological constitution of ourselves as human beings. Finally, we have the luxury to purchase the rights to pollute the air of ‘others’, to punish those who would trespass upon the property of our intellect, to reproduce ourselves as the cure for being ourselves. Capital has constructed a market from the architecture of illusions.
So as the Empire of capital re-establishes and makes-over an enemy in its own image, the enemy of terror and terrorism, we are invited to choose sides once again. We must return to the fold of capitalist solipsism or suffer the wrath of a supposedly merciful and democratic ‘civilization’. A supreme irony in an age defined by the rhetoric of endless choice.
Instead, we are choosing to try to leave such choices behind, to leave, to exit, to engage on different terrain. This movement of movements against capital and for humanity is an exodus, an already existing revolution, a world of immanence glimpsed as fragments. But what does it mean to speak of exodus, other than to seemingly betray in our own analysis what Lukacs calls ‘romantic anti-capitalism’? The simple acts of marginalized subjects cursing the world and revealing their own irrelevance through the futility of outrage or nihilistic gesture. At one level it is entirely simple, exodus is a metaphor for our wish to leave behind a way of life that is premised on exploitation of both people and planet, and mediated by the need for spectacle, to recover the reality of dignity, and to encourage autonomy, diversity and democracy, each of which must be implicated in the other. In this sense Exodus remains an open question, the where to, the what now, a question we have no desire to answer here. This exodus reclaims the ground – our ground – upon which we have stood and which has stood us in good stead, but which capital attempts to undermine with its false Gods and Folk Devils.
At another level, we use the term exodus critically, theoretically and analytically. This exodus has haunted social theory over the past thirty years from the streets of the Latin Quarter to Piazza Fontana and the myriad street confrontations of Seattle, Prague and Genoa and it marks the breach with the familiar terrain of struggle; the leftist confrontation with the state and the intention to seize control, this exodus has changed the geometry of hostility. Consequently, it has allowed us to explore the difficult questions that are implicit in the way a movement organises and expresses itself. If we flee from direct conflict based upon mirroring that which we oppose, move away from confrontation that seeks power, and search instead for ways to dissolve that power then we must accept that we have moved into asymmetrical and non-linear modes of engagement. Exodus cannot be a theory of trading places, but must become a place for trading theories, engaging in praxis and seeking alternatives. Our confrontations may be sublime or spectacular, as at some points we will be fleeing, at other points emerging from nowhere to surround and overwhelm. This is the war of the global and the local, of the swarm and the flea.
Implicated in this notion of Exodus are questions of strategy and vision, about how and when to act, the use or otherwise of violence, about the applicability of collective visions, utopian and pragmatic, that animate and inspire our movements. There can be no simple dichotomies here and no easy rhetoric. Instead, these are choices about agency and praxis, how to act in a world where actions may always be subject to accommodation or subjugation. Amongst many things this movement has sought to represent is the possibility of representation, of acknowledgement for a community or communities that have disappeared under the prevailing logic of neo-liberal capitalism, of an appeal to hidden constituencies of support. This is the time for us to remember who those constituencies are, to make sure they remember us and to refuse to make the only choice we are offered.
There are a number of things then that we hold to be true in this post-September 11th context. First, our movement of movements must not cede the global level of struggle, which has been amongst its most creative and courageous undertakings. Particularly as exhibited in the imagination shown by those who articulated, conveyed and responded to calls such as those from Chiapas for the first Encuentro ‘por Humanidad y contra el neoliberalismo’ or from London for the first ‘Carnival Against Capitalism’. This is the courage of those who have protected the idea of being ‘against capitalism’ and who have seen their spark ignite connections across continents. For too long exhortations to think global and act local served to deny this potential and effectively handed the control of the global to capital, which has always thought and acted globally
Secondly, in a period where the liberal fantasy of human rights is demonstrable by their absence and revocability on whim, the only defence against anti-terrorism laws is the certainty of resistance by communities who ‘harbour’ activists. This is only to note the importance of belonging and appealing to a constituency of support in the places we live. This is the local at work, not some idealized notion of a domain outside of the reach of the global or somehow preserved as authentic, but rather the idea that our ideas and actions are rooted in and connected to our neighbours whomever they may be
Thirdly, we are reminded that history is not over. Nor were the events of September 11th the start of a qualitatively new period of history, rather, we believe the opposite is true. Everything changed so all could remain the same. These actions marked a return to, not a departure from a familiar terrain of engagement. The world is again being engineered towards an unsustainable dualism of competing fundamentalisms, both of which must be opposed resolutely and openly, locally and globally, but with thought and patience. Without such opposition collective memory fades and we might find ourselves once again working towards the end of the world as opposed to the end of the world of the spectacle.
Shifting Ground Collective January 2002
[i] Internationale Situationniste 3/8; Oct., 108