Latest entries

A selection of words from some Elephant meanderings throughout the years to provoke thought and action on a subject often seen merely in its grotesque manifestations leading to muscular confrontations that numb the brain in the brash logic of extreme opposites, momentary victories that leave the megamachine to carry on only to be duly recharged by the input of the zealous citizen anti-racist racists. To conclude, a few small dives into viscid waters, the amniotic fluid, of our world, a world of prohibitions, self-censuring and inhibition, all under the banner of ‘respect’ and ‘safety’.

In a book on the first International, Gustav Jaeckh, a pre-war social-democracy writer, called Bakunin “eine politische Verbrechernatur” (a nature of political criminal). If a wrecker of law is a political criminal, Mr. Jaeckh is right. Bakunin wants to break all the tables of law that restrict human nature. Bakunin, by putting man above the law, is truly, by his nature, a criminal, a wrecker, like all great men. And when Jaeckh finds this frightening, this author simply shows that his fellows are missing something in order to understand human greatness. Bakunin demands the suppression of all that opposes, in “law”, the fruitful becoming of man. Bakunin is with what is new, with what becomes, with the future, against the past, the present, the traditional. He is with the fecundity of chaos against what is condemned to die. Bakunin is a Promethean nature; alongside him Kropotkin is a kind of George Sand and Marx a red policeman, a Ghepeu official.

The second issue of a magazine like this is, for us, a great success. Not only are we pleased, which would be obvious, we are also a little surprised. We were under no illusions, and still do not have any. The list of the problems we found incomprehensible, drawn up in the article “And now?” in Issue One, is still valid, although we have tried to give some answers here. Not that these answers are not satisfactory in themselves, but as we were putting them down other doubts appeared, even more complex and numerous.

Our boundless horizons disdain the world of time, uninterrupted flux of measurable aspects from boredom to slaughter that mark the daily doing of civilisation and its History, a man-made assemblage of fables and litanies. We have therefore retrieved the following words, not to be swallowed literally, but which through their force of penetration and above all opening towards the unknown paths of a conscious struggle to nowhere, might be welcomed into a process of thinking, discussion, experimentation in the field of attack, the only admissible place for verification of intentions. Far from the parcelised rythms of specialisation, submission, fear of the future or the comfort of the new perspectives mapped out by all-pervasive technologies towards a green-tinged concerted ‘we’re all in this together’ attempt to save the planet (for the bosses).

Life has deserted the soulless labyrinth of man’s daily doings. So seemingly ecumenical, so apparently volatile, she is not so cheap. Attempts to encounter her by the slaves of democracy remain just that. The apparent choices in the shop windows of capital come down to one: you can inhabit the swamp with the frogs, wallow in the global quagmire of participation and help spread the mud till even your dreams become grey. Or you can go. Take flight with the vagabonds of the spirit, let the glow of freedom ignite your passions, kindle your spirit, illuminate your mind. Throw away all the prostheses and venture into the abyss of a world without limits.

I am convinced that a revolutionary challenge to the current social order must necessarily be a challenge to the last ten thousand years of institutional development that have created it. In short, revolutionary critique must aim at civilization itself. But what precisely does this mean?

This pamphlet is an attempt to analyse the various mechanisms whereby modern society manipulates its slaves into accepting their slavery and — at least in the short term — seems to succeed. It does not deal with ‘police’ and ‘jails’ as ordinarily conceived but with those internalised patterns of repression and coercion, and with those intellectual prisons in which the ‘mass individual’ is today entrapped.

A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny. Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work. Blind and finite men, they have wished to be wiser than their God; weak and contemptible men, they have presumed to rehabilitate what their God had cursed. I, who do not profess to be a Christian, an economist or a moralist, I appeal from their judgement to that of their God; from the preachings of their religious, economics or free thought ethics, to the frightful consequences of work in capitalist society.