Past the Age of Dinosaurs: A letter to the Left


by: tfs- ashira_collective@yahoo.com
distributed by: piece out- pieceout@hotmail.com at a March 19th demo in Denver, Colorado.

“They dream of orderly revolutions, neatly drawn up principles, anarchy without turbulence. If things take a different turn they start screaming provocation—yelling loud enough for the police to hear them. Revolutionaries are pious folk. The revolution is not.”
-Alfredo Bonanno

Today, March 19th, leftists, starry-eyed activists, and pacifists will once again symbolically protest at a permitted demonstration against a war that symbolic protest has failed to stop—the second annual celebration of the antiwar movement’s failure. The speakers will bore most of the younger crowd leaving the elderly and die-hard critics of US foreign policy to cheer like sheep when Professor Whatever makes his “demand” for “peace and justice.” In some cities a minority will breakaway from the main body and march in the street—believing them selves as truly rebelling. Maybe there will be a few arrests. But whatever the case, the event’s impact will be the same. The protesters protested; some may have gotten out of hand (the news will say: “Protest mostly peaceful, some arrests,) but over all democracy functioned. That is to say the Opposition in civil society served its role and everyone outside of it doesn’t have to care. Tomorrow, no one will talk about the event; we’ll all go back to work on Monday, and the war will continue.

The left is a parody of resistance. And we’re all guilty of this—some more than others. From the commie front groups seeking to gain control of “the masses” and seize political power to the peace groups hoping to gain a piece of the pie through building “grassroots partnerships” (with Power) to the student activists fetish with subculture and symbolism. Our naiveté is leftism. Our actions (or lack-there-of) today are merely a spec in the mountain of “protesters” being the Opposition Role in civil society.

Civil society allows us, even when it represses—even when we are repressed with spectacular violence, the “right” to demonstrate against one of its facets (i.e. war, capitalism/globalization, police brutality…etc) because through our spectacular and symbolic actions, we reinforce the democratic assumption of civil society. Furthermore we become more easily marginalized and alien from the non-protester. If we play a role in civil society, we are civil society. This means the left and the right are both heads and tails of the same coin—the same rotten social order.

Let’s digress a little bit.

The left, as any vehicle for liberation, died a long time ago. Perhaps when the first union turned it’s back on the Freemen of South Carolina1 or maybe when the Bolsheviks usurped the revolution in Russia. Or maybe leftism has always been necrophilia’s ideology—a byproduct of the death culture: modernity. Never the less, Jesus H. Marx is dead and will not be rising again. Perhaps the time has come for us to wash the corpse from our mouth.

What does this mean? It means no methodology that relies on the moral high ground, on the huddled masses joining The Party, The Union, or The Coalition or seizing power will achieve our liberation. It means that every part of our lives is entrenched in hierarchies and relationships of domination. It means there will not be a demonstration big enough, a subculture sexy enough, a chemical that gets you high enough, a politician benevolent enough, or a war bad enough to defeat Power and give us freedom. This means there is no justice, just us. This means we must recognize our place as oppressed and exploited as privileged, get together (or not) with people with similar experiences and interests and name our oppressors; name the web of our oppressions: civil society and make total and continuous war on all social and civilized order.

If you’re still mystified by elections, mass symbolic protests, and the masochism of leftism—the illusion of building a new world in the shell of the old, “the huddled masses” joining your crusade, then enjoy you’re bigger cage and longer chain. We’ll see you in the same dustbin of history filled with all the politicians (and those in waiting) capitalists, socialists and all ideology.

The world does not belong to us. If it has a master who is stupid enough to want it the way it is, let him have it. Let him count the ruins in place of buildings, the graveyards in place of cities, the mud in place of rivers and the putrid sludge in the place of seas. The greatest conjuring spectacle in the world no longer enchants us. (Bonanno 27)

With the weight of over a century of failure off our backs, we are free to move chess pieces on a board no one else is playing. Discover new and old ways of resisting. Find the praxis in our everyday lives. Join with others ready to claim our total freedom and make permanent revolution by any means necessary.

1: Ignatiev, Noel: Introduction to the United States, an autonomous political history

Bibliography:

1. Armed Joy: Alfredo Bonanno
2. Nihilism, Anarchy and the 21st Century: Aragorn!
3. Gramsci’s Black Marx: Wither the Slave in Civil Society? : Frank Wilderson

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