INSURRECTION ANARCHIST MAGAZINE - ISSUE FIVE AUTUMN 1988 + £1.00 A QUESTION OF CEASS AGAINST TECHNOLOGY AGAINST ECOLOGY SABOTAGE AGAINST SHELE PINELLI THE MORAE SPLIT. PLUS SUPPLEMENP SABOTAGE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGYIssue five - October 1988 - Editor: Jean Weir Correspondence and Distribution: Elephant Editions BM Elephant, London WC IN 3XX USA/Canada distribution P.O. Box 121, $5 MacCaul Street, Toronto, Canada Trade distribution: A Distribution, 84b Whitechapel High Street, London USA/Canada: Marginal Distribution, 37 Vine Street, Toronto, Canada Printed by Alfa Grafica Sgroi, Catania, Italy Cover design: Clifford Harper 2 Editorial The passage to post-industrial capitalism is not complete. It is a thorny road, opening up new contradictions which previous forms of exploitation that nailed masses of people to the workplace were able to suffocate. What little remains of the traditional workforce is still being tailor- ed down through early retirements and redundancies. Those for whom there is still a place are finding themselves accomplices to a production process that demands no-strike deals and even no union presence at all. The rest of the exploited have become a mobile army of underpay- ed, unskilled workers, students or unemployed. The single indivi- dual sometimes finds himJherself adopting these different roles in rotation, seeing no outlet on the horizon, facing a future of vague questions that hold no apparent solution, The absence of the great military-style factories has led to a mass regimentation into leisure centres, football stadiums, discos, mega- concerts, etc, to dilute and channel frustrations and aspirations into these modern day enclaves. To some extent they are succeed- ing, but the containment is far from being complete. The much publicised rural violence, inner city riots and football hooliganism are the arenas where some of the deeper contrasts of this project of cultural and social annihilation, and the blind, inarticulate struggle to “be”, are expressing themselves. It is clear then that the new structure of capital that is emerging is also defining the conditions of the struggle. The State’s aim is to render the latter impotent, but the ineliminable fact of exploita tion makes that impossible. What is being eliminated is the old concept of struggle within the factory gatés, At best it is now taking place outside them, after the key has been thrown away. That does not mean the struggle has become redundant. It means we have to open our eyes to see where it really is taking place. Nor does it mean that the struggle at the factory gate has lost its validity—it hasn’t if it is taken away from the logic of union bargaining and linked to the whole social process. In this context anarchist dreams of building huge organisations inorder to expropriate the means of production and put them to good social use for the benefit of all, refer to a reality that no longer exists, They are based on a sentimental link with the past and have no bearing on what is happening today or will happen in the future. To take over the capitalist system of production today would be to inherit a militarily planned, death-orientated structure which could never be put to “good” social use. First, because we do not possess the language with which to use it. Second, because there can be no good use of a network of data and technology whose sole purpose is power and the accumulation of knowledge related to that techno- logy. Anything else is marginal and subjugated to this project. There is nothing left but to destroy it all, and from this to build a new world with man as its point of reference. To flank trade union conflicts that arise from the restructuring of capital, without bringing a new element into these conflicts that aims to take them beyond their uniquely political nature, can only fuel illusions among those who are paying a high price for their new misery. Comrades who see these struggles as the privileged sector for intervention and go into them acritically, bear considerable res- ponsibility. Various factors come to play: illusion, ignorance, a sense of guilt, the refusal to see the need for analysis, the need to feel the imme- diate satisfaction of striking a few cops, and so on. ‘Another reason is the conformism within some areas of the move- ment to a kind of workerist fundamentalism that reduces com- rades to enacting a parody of party politics, with the variant that they are less efficient, and adhere to different (but just as rigid) rules of behaviour and costume. They condemn the actions of individuals or small groups as “irra- tional” or “elitist”. In this way a preventive censorship is taking place within the movement, in the attempt to ensure that order re- ‘mains within the ranks, that nothing will happen to rock the boat of a reasonably planned, painstakingly structured phantom that in some way, some how, some time, is to take humanity into a new world of freedom and creativity. Then there are those who do act, who do appreciate the value of the small group, the simple action, the superfluity of organisation without action. These groups have given a considerable metho- dological contribution to the struggle. What they lack is a social and class perspective with the result that their actions, no matter how well prepared and successful in the immediate sense, fall into the logic of reformism due to the comrades’ obtusity in seeing the struggle in one single issue. Here we can include the active part of the feminist movement, the anti-nuclear activists, the ecology direct action groups, animal liberation groups, radical homosexuals, etc. On the one hand we have fear of the freedom to make decisions and act on one’s own initiative and responsibility. On the other, the fear of moving into a radical critique of the whole of social relations. There is nothing ‘abnormal’ about these fears. They are a more than normal product of society under capitalism. They can be overcome. Not all at once. But the construction of the self that has been stolen from us can only come about through acting now, in a perspective of revolutionary totality.