"Contemplating ruins is an activity that is well suited to intellectuals. Sitting in what remains of Catalus's drawing room, they look around bewilderedly asking themselves what on earth went wrong. First of all we need to clarify the idea of crisis. I have been examining all the interesting implications of this concept for some years. In actual fact crises do not exist. They never have. Every now and then periods of change are called crises in order to favour particular political strategies or to justify their shortcomings. As we can see, it is not simply a question of terminology. The concept of crisis implies the existence of a linear process that suddenly suffers a rebound, as though forces that are either external or intrinsic to it suddenly cease to function.
That explains the great science of predicting such moments, at times replaced by devoted expectancy or by the more or less sanguinary efforts of the mole that keeps clawing away. Unfortunately these friendly little creatures do not work for us. A linear process only exists in the dreams of economists and revolutionaries who want to attest their power, or that to which they aspire at some time in the future. It might be instead that everything simply gropes about in a jungle of relations, giving rise to a situation that is quite illogical as opposed to one that is simply of a logic devoid of order and progress. In such a varied, contradictory context we find atrocities and barbarity one believed disappeared centuries ago flourishing alongside technological discoveries of a future that is already present. So just as it is ridiculous to talk of progress, the idea of crises - the product of such a concept - also falls. [...]
It is indispensable to be aware of the conditions that are affecting the reality we are operating in when we act, especially now as they are so different to the classical formulae that once explained things in deterministic terms.
Let us make it clear right away that none of these problems interests us. We are not concerned with the political problems of those who see unemployment as a danger to democracy and order. We do not feel any nostalgia for lost professionalism. We are even less interested in elaborating libertarian alternatives to grim factory work or intellectual labour, which are unwittingly doing nothing but toe the line of the advanced postindustrial project. Nor are we for the abolition of work or its reduction to the minimum required for a meaningful happy life. Behind all this there is always the hand of those who want to regulate our lives, think for us, or politely suggest that we think as they do.
We are for the destruction of work and, as we will try to demonstrate, that is quite a different matter. But let us proceed in an orderly fashion.
The post-industrial society, which we will come to later, has resolved the problem of unemployment, at least within certain limits, by dispersing the work force into flexible sectors which are easy to manoeuvre and control. In actual fact the social threat of growing unemployment is more theoretical than practical, and is being used as a political deterrent to dissuade wide social strata from attempting to organise in ways that might question the choices of neo-liberalism, especially at international level. So, precisely because workers are much easier to control when they are skilled and attached to the workplace with career prospects in the production unit, there is insistence everywhere – even among the ecclesiastical hierarchies – on the need to give people work and thereby reduce unemployment. Not because the latter constitutes a risk from the point of view of production, but because the danger could come from precisely that flexibility which is now indispensable to the organisation of production today. The fact that the worker has been robbed of a precise identity could lead to social disintegration, making control more difficult in the medium term. That is what all the institutional fuss about unemployment is really about. [...]
In the same way, the productive process no longer requires a high level of professional training, at least for the majority of workers. The need for skilled labour has been replaced by a demand for flexibility, i.e., an adaptability to do tasks that are constantly being changed, and willingness to move from one firm to the other. In short, they must adapt to a life of change in accordance with the bosses needs. This is now being programmed from school onwards, where the institutional cultural elements that once constituted the basic technical knowledge from which the world of work built real professionalism, are no longer provided. [...]
As we all know, this is leading to a proliferation of cultural poverty in terms of taste and choices, a uniformity of demands and desires resulting in an even greater possibility to catalogue apparently free spontaneous participation. Then there is the flight from any possible diversity. Today it is codification that makes the man: the way one dresses, uses the same objects, looks for the same labels. One qualifies oneself through this uniformity, making the same gestures, moving, eating, loving, thinking and dreaming the same way as everybody else. This is the way the democracy of the future is being built. Soon politics will be born in and among people, but not before the latter have been levelled to the lowest common denominator in order to produce the flexibility necessary for post-industrial production. [...]
The break up of association was an indispensable premise for worker flexibility, and this could only be attained by abolishing the tyranny of absolute space and time.
Everything that led to the possibility of workers building a better world on and from the ruins of the old has now disappeared. It has all been ground down in the great race of accelerated procedures, the elimination of subject and object as distinct and opposing elements of a contradictory mechanism, which was nevertheless rich in prospects and vitality. In place of this mechanism we now have the domination of passage. The simple movement of something that reaches the receiver and the transmitter simultaneously, in real time, unifying them in the ongoing capacity to respond to simple, fast, coded impulses of communication. [...]
However strange it might seem, there are no specialists here. Everyone is specialised in a few routine procedures. The same hallucinatory world where programmes produced for future projects are entrusted to telematics has been substantially reduced: fewer and fewer sophisticated programmes are capable of producing yet others and so on, to infinity. [...]
I do not believe there is a specific minority in power capable of programming such changes. More than anything it is a question of processes that connect up, often inevitably... In a word, a series of causes and effects that could not be linked together, but which produced the conditions we could sum up today in the word flexibility.
So it is not possible to speak of a project that has been mapped out in all its parts. The adjustments of power are always approximate and tend to settle along the line of least resistance. Moreover, such movements can only develop to the point where the elements which comprise them reach their full potential. Today, the present disintegration upon which the new structures of power are being built must reach the extreme consequence in every aspect. That is, power cannot materially expand fully and leave an associative mentality and culture intact. Just as it cannot go ahead with a democratic mechanism based on past processes and values. They require new political forms to correspond to the new forms of production and social life.
So the project for a new kind of democracy is materialising, and that is the final point of these notes. Like all the projects of power this one is vague, but it bases itself on needs that already exist, are clearly visible, and could be summed up in a few essential points.
The main point is participation. The arrogance of the old political caste is not suitable for the changing conditions. The citizen must participate, not to make political life (which will always be a ghost in an artificial world) become real, but to make the decision-making mechanisms of power more effective.
The immediate consequence of democratic participation is the birth of the active citizen who has discarded his old disinterest and apathy toward politics, where men he considered superior were buried in the corridors of power, manipulating the lives of their subjects. The political sphere has been broken up into a myriad of possible openings for intervention. Voluntary work has been institutionalised. The monopoly of the professional politicians has given way to free political initiative where representation stays within precise credibility limits, even to the extent of certain circumscribed areas being controlled from the base. Politics begins at home. The leaflet, once an instrument exclusively in the hands of an active minority, is now commonly used as an instrument for voicing opinions. In this way everyone is under the illusion that they are reinventing the way to run public spending, by living inside and alongside the institutions rather than submitting to decisions that are made elsewhere. So democracy is widening and becoming rationalised. It is presenting itself as being equal for all in practice, not just in theory. The majority system no longer rebounds against those who use it, and a plurality of interventions makes knowledge of decisions possible.
This new pack of illusions produced itself almost spontaneously as soon as the old mechanisms of political groupings where delegates, charismatic party leaders, central committees with their dominant ideologies and the aims of liberation that imposed sacrifice and death, were all dismantled. All this has finally disappeared. What is left is flexible, objective disintegration that is clear for anyone who wants to see it, in that it comes from a process of development that is unequivocally ongoing: the process of production. So there are more ways to participate. The need for social justice, one of the fundamental aims of a movement that has responded to the putrefying old political world with total condemnation, immediately transferred itself, and it could not have done otherwise, to precisely the area of participation. This has been taken up by the new builders of ideology. It is they who are building the flexible ideology of future democracy. And this new dimension will give positive results. It will give greater possibilities to some and deny others any at all. It will guarantee the legality of political procedures of management, extend control, but make it seem as though it is being managed from the base, desired by the people, guaranteed by a plurality of opinions. It will allow greater security for the included, separating them from the excluded, building an unscalable wall around them, foreseeing new needs that are specific to the ruling class and are incomprehensible to the dominated. It will select the excluded on the basis of their possible participation, showing varying degrees of tolerance towards them according to their levels of participation. At the extreme limit, for the non-participants, the maladapted – the excluded excluded from everything – there will still be systems of segregation. Not so much the oldstyle prisons as new ones run by people in white coats.
These are the programmes for restructuring power and transforming democracy. Opposing oneself to all this is a part of the fascinating and indispensable revolutionary project that is perhaps still to be invented."
Let's keep our feet on the ground, please let's destroy work
An invention's near always just a discovery of what was already staring you in the face but only recognized when consciousness is in an altered state. Then, bam!, like it's brand new. With a little free association, the clues abound. Consider the synonyms: "share" with "participation" and then "partake", like "help yourself" or "it's on the way". That's almost a praxical algorithm, where all going in rhythm doesn't necessarily imply group-think, especially when it's practice, a feast or a dance – it might just be counterpunctual and quite unnecessary at that. Obviously, flexibility (or so it would seem) is not a big problem unless one's own taste-buds have atrophied. When neither a necessary flaccidity, nor lacking any vitality, flex should be strength mixed with grace so that each and every gratuity's free – never a theft if there's no property nor intrusion when stripped of authority.
When flex joins rexidity and movement's in form
direction's a hex to inform the forlorned
"of this genrealized idiocy" few would insist –
"trust in your taste when yer feeling lickerish"
– but who wouldn't really & truly agree
with "please do not meddle your metal on me!"
Be ever careful with what you intend
as I've made a crowbar, it could be your end.– atka mip
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