Full list of texts

No one at all capable of an intense conscious inner life need ever hope to escape mental anguish and suffering. Sorrow and often despair over the so-called eternal fitness of things are the most persistent companions of our life. But they do not come upon us from the outside, through the evil deeds of particularly evil people. They are conditioned in our very being; indeed, they are interwoven through a thousand tender and coarse threads with our existence.

We are so perverted by an education which from infancy seeks to kill in us the spirit of revolt, and to develop that of submission to authority; we are so perverted by this existence under the rule of a law, which regulates every event in life—our birth, our education, our development, our love, our friendship—that, if this state of things continues, we shall lose all initiative, all habit of thinking for ourselves.

The old work ethic has disappeared along with the massive obsolete structures of capital which required a permanent army of producers, yet work still has far more implications than mere survival. Millions of people still compete for the privilege of turning up day after day, year after year, to surrender body and soul in exchange for a wage. The alternative: to encounter one’s real desires and create the means required to realise them, could present some surprises and lead to undreamed choices. A job, boring or arduous as it might be, is the easy way out. It gives structure to our day and puts order in our expectations, giving us just enough in our pockets to acquire instant sublimation and quell any sudden surge of hatred towards what is stealing our time and our lives.

In the early hours of 22 May 2009, a bicycle moves through a cold Santiago night. A comrade carries in his rucksack an insurrectional dream. He’s carrying a homemade bomb and his single objective becomes clearer with each pedal: attack the school of the Gendarmeria. Around 1.30 in the morning, he makes his last stop, only one block separates him from completing the action. But in an instant, an unexpected accident sets off the detonation. The Bomb that should have gnashed in the face of the powerful, when activated threw the body of the compañero Mauricio Morales Duarte to the middle of the street. Mauri was, and is, an anarchist comrade. Actually, an anarchist apprentice as he jokingly liked to call himself. We are not looking to glorify or create blind admiration for our friend by means of this text: on the contrary, we are adamant that Mauri does the speaking. His own words will do the describing. Brother Mauri, this is for you...

Prison has come out of the shadows into the limelight, as not a day passes without some allusion to ‘solving the problem’ of the State’s overflowing dungeons. Advances in surveillance technology are offering alternative models of isolation and control that could see a large number of the latters’ potentially explosive inmates defused and—opportunely tagged or microchipped—sent back to the urban ghettos of capital from whence they came. The main obstacle, bolstered by some retrograde attempts to gain votes through a sworn intractability concerning the ‘enemy within’, is power’s need for mass consensus from those it had led to believe that the State’s protection racket and promise of long custodial sentences were the ultimate social guarantee. The dilemma has given space to a whole range of social cops in an ongoing battle that the sycophantic media have not missed the opportunity to illuminate. The occult world of prison never fails to provide good headlines for those in search of a frisson, ‘enlightened discussion’ or fodder for animated pub talk (the latter often concluding with a call for the reinstatement of the death penalty).

When reading the following pages it would be well to put everything that we already know about technology aside. Indeed, what knowledge or hypothesis passed off as certainty makes up the scientific aspect of technology? Not much.

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.

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’.