UPDATE October 1: first version was missing part of the text; this version contains the entire text. Sorry!
“The exit from economy has nothing to do with a “better economy”, like that of Tim Jackson, as soon as one understands that economy in all its forms, ecological in particular, is a regimentation, a specific political regime, although one that is not studied by the political scientists or understood by the “degrowth” promoters, paralyzed as they are by their “democratism”. It’s not a matter of “decolonizing the imaginary”, but rather of calling for a liberation struggle against despotism (recapturing the spirit of 1793, which is not mainly ecological!). The question is not that of good behaviors (that’s economy), but of new forms of non-economic life, indifferent to economy.”
Our second piece by Jacques Fradin, translated by Robert Hurley. First available here; original French article here.
The Black Liberation Army and the Radical Legacy of the Black Panther Party
“the Black Liberation Army was
not a centralized, organized group with a common
leadership and chain of command. Instead there
were various organizations and collectives working together out of various cities, and in some larger cities there were often several groups working
independently of each other.”
This essay is excerpted from The Philosophy of the Encounter, a
collection of Althusser’s last writings.We are excited to critically
re-publish it here. His investigation of the clinamen, of aleatory
materialism, of the encounter, has been deeply influential to us in
understanding our own lives and politics, and contemporary and
past philosophers and communist and anarchist theorists. It opens
space for historical materialism without teleology, for understanding
our current hell-world as always contingent and precarious, always
on the verge of dissolution, and for thinking about the ways that
chance encounters with friends and enemies affect us and our
lives.The particles colliding in the swerve might be the historical
conditions which just happen to coincide in such a way to allow
the birth of capitalism—which means they just as well might not
have, in a rejection of orthodox Marxist teleology—or they might
simply be the encounters we have with friends from near and far,
the creation of small worlds with each other, from which we can
fight our enemies and care for each other, until our encounter
dissolves and we move apart again. For us, the clinamen grants a
certain freedom and lightness: if this world wasn’t predestined but
simply happened to result from a certain combination of events,
then it might also fall apart at any moment. If we look at the grand
arc of human history with an eye for the aleatory, we realize that
we are not locked in an eternal hell of capital and the state.While
what comes next might be worse, it might also be better, or at
least different.As Lucretius put it so many years ago:
So, then, time changes the nature of all the world,
And earth takes one condition, then another,
Can’t bear what it could, and can, what it could not bear.
The footnotes offered by the original editors of this text are
reprinted here; our own explanatory asides are set into the
margins.We hope that the asides provide more clarity and context
for some of the more obscure references; they also reveal some
of our own political position, the points at which we encounter
Althusser, and the points at which we swer ve decidedly away. As
readers, this is our contribution to a long conversation; we hope to
continue this conversation with you, as well, should we encounter
one another.
“If necessary, an oxygen mask will drop from
the ceiling,”
If necessary?
The Department of Homeland Security includes open windows or doors, curiousity
about a building’s purpose, and extended loitering without explanation as behavior that
could indicate terrorism or a terrorist-related crime
The anxiety of the state and capital whispers
personal directives from a recording. A calm
flight attendant dulcetly intones from nowhere. These whispers grow to a deafening
drone. As the discourse and landscape of total institutions enclose around us, we listen
to the ways they manage their anxiety.
Come closer, the structure is creaking.
I thank you for coming. I thank you, and
I welcome you.
This story comes after hope or the goal of
‘winning’. Those who project themselves into
a fictive communist future, solving population level problems, speak about ‘winning’. We
leave this for the future administrators.
We have no hope of a final cream-filled peace.
The struggle against power will not end in a
new garden. So our ruthless questions will
not look for a singular, final answer. This is a
story of how to tear ravenously toward the
present with no hope.
Incidentally, we’ll be tabling in absentia at the NAH FAIR in LA this Saturday, Feb 13. If you’re in the area swing by and pick up some hard copies of our stuff!
“The Human need to be liberated in the world is not the same as the Black need to be liberated from the world; which is why even their most radical cognitive maps draw borders between the living and the dead.”
The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents
“The security paradigm implies that each dissension, each more or less violent attempt to overthrow its order, becomes an opportunity to govern them in a profitable direction”
“Havoc, then, is the other side of class, which itself meant—and means—both a division of people into classes for the purpose of extracting wealth (taxation) and a calling to arms. Havoc is held off by class and threatens to overwhelm it, the anarchic turn of stealing and laying waste that illuminates, negatively, this other relation, of legal theft and sanctioned destruction of lives and resources.”
An oldie but goodie–Evan Calder Williams with a devastating critique of liberal & leftist responses to the London riots of 2011. Still relevant, still cutting; makes a perfect stocking-stuffer for that condescending realist in your family who just shakes their head and sighs about all those “violent hoodlums”
“Counter-logistics is not simply a matter of
blocking all flows, of stopping movement, of locking things
in place where they are. It is a matter of blocking those
flows that constitute the material and metaphysical tissue
of this world, while simultaneously enhancing our own
ethical connections, movement, and friendship. Helping
migrants to cross borders and remain undetected, helping
information to cross through and within prison walls, destroying surveillance cameras, defending the basis of new
worlds seized in opposition to the old—these are as important as blocking rail lines and disrupting commerce.”
This book is a collection of critical texts focused on logistics, counter-logistics, and cybernetics. It attempts to combine some disparate groups and tendencies that have all taken a recent turn towards evaluating infrastructure and logistics as a crucial element in the perpetuation of capital and control, and as vulnerable points worthy of study, evaluation, and attack. Available as a web-readable PDF (below), a series of easy to print imposed zines (also below) for your own personal reading group, or as a pretty paperback book for $8 plus shipping. To purchase a book, email nonewideas@riseup.net