“It was a romantic life, maybe to be looked back upon as the glory days of youth. If it was poverty, it was poverty only on paper. Poverty is a mathematical equation, an expression of how much one can buy. What about how much we can steal? Doesn’t that count for anything?” anonymous, Evasion
“Before economics could claim the title of ‘the science of behaviors,’ or even the status of ‘applied psychology,’ the economic creature, the being of need, had to be made to proliferate on the surface of the Earth. This being of need, this needy toiler, is not a creation of nature. For a long time there were only ways of living, and not needs. One inhabited a certain portion of the world, and one knew how to feed oneself, clothe oneself, entertain oneself, and put a roof over one’s head there. Needs were historically produced, by tearing men and women away from their world. Whether this took the form of raids, expropriation, enclosures, or colonization matters little in this context. Needs were what economy gave to man in return for the world it took away.” The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 214.
“That one is fighting against a tyrant doesn’t mean that one is fighting for democracy. One may also be fighting for a different tyrant, or for the simple joy of fighting.
But if there is one thing that has nothing to do with the principle of majority it is insurrections, the victory of which depends on qualitative criteria – having to do with determination, courage, self-confidence, strategic sense, and collective energy.
If for two centuries elections have been the most widely used instrument after the army for suppressing insurrections it is clearly because the insurgents are never a majority.”
The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends
The man who is free to obey the law is not free
The man who is free to do as he is told is not free
The man who is free to live according to the norms of a sociality created to ensure the thriving of slaves is not free
The man who knows that this is the case is a conflicted beast
And he is dangerous.
“We speak of masters and nobility, as if just by vocalization the world has been transformed; and of course, everything has only happened between slaves, conquering or conquered. The mania for representing, for being represented, for getting oneself represented; for having representatives and representeds: this is the mania that is common to all slaves, the only relation between themselves that they can conceive of, the relation they impose with their triumph. It is the slave, with its mediocre dialectical machine that exclaims to all the futility of escape.” Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 81 (translation modified).
“Nietzsche asks: who conceives of the will to power as a will to get oneself recognized? Who conceives of power itself as the object of a recognition? Who essentially wants to be represented as superior and even wants his inferiority to be represented as superiority? ‘It is the slave who seeks to persuade us to have a good opinion of him; it is also the slave who then bends his knee before these opinions as if it wasn’t him who produced them.’ What we present to ourselves as power itself is merely the representation of power formed by the slave. What we present to ourselves as the master is the image of the triumphant slave.” Gilles Deleuze and Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche and Philosophy 80-81, On the Genealogy of Morality 3:14.
“The State-sponsored Intellectual History of the West makes clear the function of knowledge as a tool that integrates conception, sociality (civil society and the citizen), and spirituality to coincide precisely with the needs and aspirations of the bourgeoisie. The intellectual, then by definition, is the man or woman who best elaborates the dominant (hegemonic) social order, as those beyond such an order are, by definition, non-intellectual. The task today is to produce an intellect among men and women beyond the order. The new intellect, however, must have its own, organic, language and conceptual base. If the State’s hegemony is built using bourgeois technologies, then the limits of that hegemony must be found in the counter to the bourgeois. Such a counter is best summarized in one word: violence.” Antonio Gramsci, “The Intellectuals,” from The Prison Notebooks; Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide; Georges Sorel, “Letter to Daniel Halévy,” from Reflections on Violence.
The deer were bounding like blown leaves
Under the smoke in front the roaring wave of the brush-fire;
I thought of the smaller lives that were caught.
Beauty is not always lovely; the fire was beautiful, the terror
Of the deer was beautiful; and when I returned
Down the back slopes after the fire had gone by, an eagle
Was perched on the jag of a burnt pine,
Insolent and gorged, cloaked in the folded storms of his shoulders
He had come from far off for the good hunting
With fire for his beater to drive the game; the sky was merciless
Blue, and the hills merciless black,
The sombre-feathered great bird sleepily merciless between them.
I thought, painfully, but the whole mind,
The destruction that brings an eagle from heaven is better than mercy.
Robinson Jeffers, from Thurso’s Landing.
“The industrial age made it increasingly difficult for individuals to take full responsibility for themselves.” Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation.
Derelict Space 