HELLO!
The neutralizing action of ATTAC and the “left of the left” has now started to be publicly exposed. The Ministry of the Interior’s cars have the subtitle “Ministry of Citizenship” written in cursive letters on their sides. Sub-commandant Marcos is marching on Mexico city with the outrageous project ot participating in the creation – at long last! – of a true Mexican State. And, at the same time, all kinds of organizations – AC!, DAL, Act Up, etc. – which had embodied a sort of critical revival at the start of the 90s because at the time their “symbolic actions” were the object of large-scale media coverage, are now either integrated into the project of a citizen modernization of Capital or have been left for dead. And the counter-summits, in turn, are now boring for those who at first had a taste for them; their repetition has reduced them to being just picturesque elements of a new, inoffensive folklore.
All this means that the moment has come to tear off the stranglehold that the false opposition between Capital and its contestation has held all practice of violent antagonism in. The solidarity between “citizenism” (which could perhaps be called “bovism” not only beceause it has so many specifically French traits, but also to underline its transitory and inconsistent character) and Capital doesn’t only have to do with the fact that they share the same sappy language, that of economy, or that the bovist movement is in the last resort controlled by the capitalist State. It has above all to do with the fact that together they form a controlled-burn apparatus, a preventive controlled burn: a controlled burn consists in fighting a fire by lighting another fire, a controlled one, around the circumference of the trajectory of the first fire. Upon contact with the controlled-burn area, the first fire loses all its dynamic and dies out there, finding nothing to feed on in that area since it’s already been burned. The ATTAC controlled burn, for instance, simulates the existence of a popular discontent with the “dictatorship of markets” so as to prevent any radical expression of the real discontent. But it itself can only function as long as it’s masked; and over the past few months it’s been coming out into the open.
In these conditions, the question is: how can we cluster together to create an offensive reality that will oppose both capital and its citizen pseudo-contestation? One possibility would be to take the coming months – in any case long before the Barcelona counter-summit – to draw up and circulate a platform, on a Europe-wide level, that would break with the dominant positions of the “anti-globalization” movement. On the basis of that text and the contacts that we already have, it will then be up to us to confer with those that, in France and elsewhere, are interested in organizing a series of anti-citizen initiatives precisely in the very places of citizen contestation; that is: in Barcelona in June and in Genoa in July.
One point that we can leverage ourselves on, which also forms the central contradiction of a discourse certainly not lacking in contradictions, is that the citizen does not exist. Or rather, that there are no citizens, merely proofs of citizenship. And those proofs are administered endlessly every day in an attempt to bring about an impossible integration into the new, cybernetic process of social valorization. The adjective “citizenist” now has to replace the old term “social” now that the existence of society itself is in question, having been effectively pulverized by the universal incursion of commodity mediation. Manifesting the existence of a non-citizen pole would thus be the first step towards aggregating the multiple forces and numerous existences permanently trying to get out of the present state of things, but whose isolation invariably drags them right back into it.