The Situationist List
Re:Fwd: postmayday
dear friends living on the europeninsula or across the earth,
"it was a good precarious, migrant, queer mayday either in aachen or san francisco, milano or tokyo, and in many other cities. more in general, unlike maydays since 1989 or since 1945, mayday 008 was truly globally widespread and painfully relevant, from istanbul to hamburg, from moscow to djakarta. a postcommunist as well as postcapitalist left is finally emerging, and the original meaning of mayday has been recovered: a day of anarchosocialist celebration calling for a transnational and transethnic alliance of all wage labor against global capitalism, starting from its most exploited and disenfranchised sections. Today, we can feel confident to say that mayday is back to its earlier historical significance, coming back from the postcoldwar partial eclipse of its importance, when it was widely seen as remnant of a soviet or maoist past (e.g. bush's "victory" ceremony on an air carrier in the china sea on mayday 2003)."
—- from an email sent to hybrid_anarchist Yahoo group on May 14, 2008.
I hate to rain on your parade, but we [are getting] our ass kicked."
—- Hudson character to the ass-wholistic Ripley character in the film, "Aliens"
What is this - a weekly status report of a "job" well done, to abstract superiors in "the masses" or "the cadre"?
First: the anarchist and socialist movements are not "resolved" merely by hyphenating or conjoining the words together as in the gloss-over of "black and red". That's an abstracting cover-ip for superseding real differences.
Second: even today, the television/iPod/cell-phone generation misses the point that reality existed prior to their manufactured consumer narcissism's entry into it. Anarchism is not democratic just because the "democracy" commodity is purchased and affixed to an organization, event, pamphlet, or memory. They truly exemplify the idiot in the Comcast ad who keeps reiterating that what he does is "different" merely because he's consumed the correct product. Nothing is closer, but rather farther away from, challenging consequently and leaping beyond the best that this social structure has availed. Most abstractly reject its offerings even though that is "us" in mutant form. They negate without affirming. They take the dynamics out of social reality. They exhibit themselves frozen in their own headlights.
Mayday "recovered"? Ha! What hogwash. It has always been more liberatory as its original holiday when children hung baskets of flowers on doors or played 'round a maypole. That's the "original", not the day of boring marches and drivelous speeches thought up by a dreary workers movement in the 1930s, run by Stalinist sympathizers. Gag!
Just how was it "post-communist" or "post-capitalist"? Because you could list off cities? I hardly think so! Were you at all those places ou so easily listed off?! Is it because someone told you that things were groovy? "Things" is a key phrase. They might be people and "organizers" intend on keeping them as "things". The organization of the the self-superseding proletariat will be by us and not by some Leninoid/anarchoid elitist twit telling us what's best for us after sipping a coffee at the college or mortgage/trust bank cafe.
Marches and strikes are designed to bore and keep us from using all we need to 'make ourselves' - occupying/seizing, restarting, and redesigning labor's input and output at ALL their 'points of alienation'. A march is as alienating as it gets: the essence of "quantity street".
That May Day salivation processions are global is more a global loss than victory, and belong in the grave with the "left" and the "right" recuperators for capital that organized them 'down onto' the proletarian as magically-charged torments; they exemplify failures at liberating from below, and successes at getting crushing from above. The 'hierarchy' is all that "takes the streets"! Streets "go nowhere" when all they connect is safely still alien. Take what the streets spectacularly connect, not the abstractified streets!
The future is not to be found in relics and rites of the past, rather passing all that for envisioning acts and acts of vision. Real movement will dance on the graves of both and all the celibacy that substitutes fro celebration in dazes like "May Day". We do not want full employment via a "workers" movement. We want unimpeded leisure and full unemployment. No wage-labor, not the reforms of "better wages" (aka "a more polite wage-slavery"). Vision isn't sharpened by bullhorns and cliche-bearing signs. It's impaired.
May Day is a holiday that consecrates 365 days (366 on leap year) of wretchedness like Sunday does for a church-goer, not that being on your knees 7 days a week like Islam is the new world. No more knees at all - 7 days a week. Not to globalists (e.g., Bilderbergers), not to theocrats (e.g., Muftis or Popes), not to nationalists (e.g., Chavez). If anything, they all deserve a kneecapping. For the rest of us, it's time to wake-and-stand up, or go to join the revered passed/past by sleeping forever.
The past is for superseding, not repeating. Herein, recycling is the act of a null'n'void "thing".
best,
chris
http://www.point-of-departure.org
"it was a good precarious, migrant, queer mayday either in aachen or san francisco, milano or tokyo, and in many other cities. more in general, unlike maydays since 1989 or since 1945, mayday 008 was truly globally widespread and painfully relevant, from istanbul to hamburg, from moscow to djakarta. a postcommunist as well as postcapitalist left is finally emerging, and the original meaning of mayday has been recovered: a day of anarchosocialist celebration calling for a transnational and transethnic alliance of all wage labor against global capitalism, starting from its most exploited and disenfranchised sections. Today, we can feel confident to say that mayday is back to its earlier historical significance, coming back from the postcoldwar partial eclipse of its importance, when it was widely seen as remnant of a soviet or maoist past (e.g. bush's "victory" ceremony on an air carrier in the china sea on mayday 2003)."
—- from an email sent to hybrid_anarchist Yahoo group on May 14, 2008.
I hate to rain on your parade, but we [are getting] our ass kicked."
—- Hudson character to the ass-wholistic Ripley character in the film, "Aliens"
What is this - a weekly status report of a "job" well done, to abstract superiors in "the masses" or "the cadre"?
First: the anarchist and socialist movements are not "resolved" merely by hyphenating or conjoining the words together as in the gloss-over of "black and red". That's an abstracting cover-ip for superseding real differences.
Second: even today, the television/iPod/cell-phone generation misses the point that reality existed prior to their manufactured consumer narcissism's entry into it. Anarchism is not democratic just because the "democracy" commodity is purchased and affixed to an organization, event, pamphlet, or memory. They truly exemplify the idiot in the Comcast ad who keeps reiterating that what he does is "different" merely because he's consumed the correct product. Nothing is closer, but rather farther away from, challenging consequently and leaping beyond the best that this social structure has availed. Most abstractly reject its offerings even though that is "us" in mutant form. They negate without affirming. They take the dynamics out of social reality. They exhibit themselves frozen in their own headlights.
Mayday "recovered"? Ha! What hogwash. It has always been more liberatory as its original holiday when children hung baskets of flowers on doors or played 'round a maypole. That's the "original", not the day of boring marches and drivelous speeches thought up by a dreary workers movement in the 1930s, run by Stalinist sympathizers. Gag!
Just how was it "post-communist" or "post-capitalist"? Because you could list off cities? I hardly think so! Were you at all those places ou so easily listed off?! Is it because someone told you that things were groovy? "Things" is a key phrase. They might be people and "organizers" intend on keeping them as "things". The organization of the the self-superseding proletariat will be by us and not by some Leninoid/anarchoid elitist twit telling us what's best for us after sipping a coffee at the college or mortgage/trust bank cafe.
Marches and strikes are designed to bore and keep us from using all we need to 'make ourselves' - occupying/seizing, restarting, and redesigning labor's input and output at ALL their 'points of alienation'. A march is as alienating as it gets: the essence of "quantity street".
That May Day salivation processions are global is more a global loss than victory, and belong in the grave with the "left" and the "right" recuperators for capital that organized them 'down onto' the proletarian as magically-charged torments; they exemplify failures at liberating from below, and successes at getting crushing from above. The 'hierarchy' is all that "takes the streets"! Streets "go nowhere" when all they connect is safely still alien. Take what the streets spectacularly connect, not the abstractified streets!
The future is not to be found in relics and rites of the past, rather passing all that for envisioning acts and acts of vision. Real movement will dance on the graves of both and all the celibacy that substitutes fro celebration in dazes like "May Day". We do not want full employment via a "workers" movement. We want unimpeded leisure and full unemployment. No wage-labor, not the reforms of "better wages" (aka "a more polite wage-slavery"). Vision isn't sharpened by bullhorns and cliche-bearing signs. It's impaired.
May Day is a holiday that consecrates 365 days (366 on leap year) of wretchedness like Sunday does for a church-goer, not that being on your knees 7 days a week like Islam is the new world. No more knees at all - 7 days a week. Not to globalists (e.g., Bilderbergers), not to theocrats (e.g., Muftis or Popes), not to nationalists (e.g., Chavez). If anything, they all deserve a kneecapping. For the rest of us, it's time to wake-and-stand up, or go to join the revered passed/past by sleeping forever.
The past is for superseding, not repeating. Herein, recycling is the act of a null'n'void "thing".
best,
chris
http://www.point-of-departure.org
