rivista anarchica
anno 40 n. 357
novembre 2010

Italiano

alternatives

The new imagery Empowerment
by Andrea Papi

Once upon a time the left was with us with his best worlds (?) to be developed. The left has disappeared, the need to imagine (and implement) no. And then we anarchists ...

 

In this phase, with a look to the surface on the situation as it presents itself, it may seem that any real breath of emancipation from this state of affairs is gradually fading. The left, which historically should be the natural carrier, is unfortunately all but disappeared as a fictional project. What remains is mostly a partisan position of deployment, in Italy, a generic face "antiberlusconiano", not a shared vision of things and the world, which instead was qualified at the beginning.
For too long, the vast and variegated cultural area merged under the name of the left had deluded to survive, continuing to drink at the source of the great myths and narratives that were self-built, under the illusion that the self-sufficiency without time limit. The fact is that much water has passed under the bridge and many, too many things have changed, to clear the value and meaning of those myths and those great stories, now for the more incomprehensible. The classical cultural heritage that define the left as a whole has become impossible, because almost all the paradigms of reference, who claimed to interpret the world for act inside in an attempt to change it, have become blunt and useless.

Heaven on earth

In my view, the root cause of this breakdown is that within the left the authoritarian culture has historically become the dominant component, the vision of a collectivism that is imposed from above, defended by the military guarantor of the continuity of seizure of power. This cultural hegemony for decades told us that the emancipation from the capitalist state of employer and employee must have the appearance of the workers' state, the Communist Party, of forced collectivization, the dictatorship of the party bureaucracy acting in the name of the proletariat. An imaginary heavy and burdensome consequences. Heaven on earth for this imaginary artifact was the assurance of home and work for all, in addition to the indispensable for everyone. All in an Orwellian context, where the state/party and the party/father thought to everything, forcing everyone to accept to be protected and defended, while individual and group autonomy was excluded, because the individuals were thought of and as subjects of a collective structure, which by force of the proletarian class in power from overseeing the needs of everyone. Individual freedom sacrificed to the reason of state (the "proletarian" state of course) collective planned economy to ensure equality imposed from above.
The fact is that this little bit of stuff has never really worked, or actually it could, if not from the viewpoint of a close and oppressive social control by a state soon became just the police. Over seven decades, the concentration camp universe that state socialism had created ignominiously collapsed on itself, not defeated in the clash with capitalism, which at least would have been honorable, but because they imploded, in utter inability to be, because they are based on a huge pile of crap.
The only surviving scrap this disgraceful way, in hopes that art powered by little burocrat crews was supposed to bring to the sun of the future are China and Cuba. They, too, but harder, last remaining evidence of the absurdity of the story that had fueled the dreams of generations eager to experience the political and economic emancipation from the yoke, as had been promised by the revolutionary fathers.
Just this summer a virtually revived Fidel Castro, called for an interview, unexpectedly declared that socialism can no longer be thought of as a model for export around the world, since it does not work either for Cuba, where it is imposed on that fateful January 1, 1959. China however has been invented and created a monster. Preserved the dictatorship of the Bolshevik party, which occupies the entire state power and imposes strength on any matter, minimizing civil liberties, banning trade union autonomy and political forces, preventing freedom of thought and expression. At the same time, given the inconsistent practice that characterized it, has abandoned the failed economic plan and has fully embraced capitalism, which was originally to be the alternative. They thus obtained to set up one of the worst dictatorships policies, together with the worst forms of economic exploitation and subjugation. Wherever the road for the authoritarian alternative led to the regression of terrifying fundamentalist obscurantism.

Domain system

Linked to this failed approach, which its proponents have the capacity and ability to make culturally dominant for decades among the masses, when the fake paradise fell into ruin with all its absurd lies, are also gone the emancipatory imagery and tension. The utopia that fueled the hope and desire for revenge does not aspire to the place turned into a dystopia feasible unfortunately, a nightmare place to escape from. The universe of the mass culture of the left, and left the same as political perspective, duped by those myths that you fed, found themselves totally devoid of support that kept them standing have evaporated as imaginary and as a matter of fact.
A complete failure, has now gone even the reformist social-democratic component, one that historically would not realize the socialist state by taking the revolutionary power, but through democratic representation, transforming the state from within supported by the bourgeois electoral support. For some decades now, the heirs of reformist socialism admittedly do not aspire to achieve more and do not seek the society and the welfare state, while trying to present itself, just like every other force in liberal / Democratic, as regulators of capitalism.
The authoritarian dream of freeing humanity from the yoke of oppression and economic policy has definitely failed, disappeared in all its components and its schools of thought. It is no understatement to emphasize that it has become impractical beyond ridiculous illusions of some fringe minority and marginalized people who stubbornly insist on repeating that story, not only more beautiful, but now really horrible in the collective consciousness.
Meanwhile, alongside this inexorable decline of the historical institutional left, many things have changed of the basic characteristic of the system of domination, not static in its structure as claimed by a certain hermeneutics of ideological left, but very dynamic and much less vulnerable than hoped that his detractors. The world can no longer be viewed as a structural and endemic struggle between two hostile classes, launched toward a destiny that would claim the future of cage in the dictatorship of the class. The of the interests at stake are far more complex and intricate theoretical simplification of a dialectical confrontation, because the classes and groups in society are changing in form and substance to the continued development of their becoming.
Above all, they are not structurally dependent on the economic dynamics of production systems, such as to require a certain ideological hermeneutics. The pressures and dynamics in the field, such as elements attractors capable of determining the composition of the plots and how to manifest, are much more complex structural forms that may take a while. Are in fact beyond the state, private property, capitalism and productive traveling outside of the structures. For example, the accumulation of financial income, which now forms the substance of reference for the exercise domain, or even the ability to be able to move independently and with a capacity for power within the computer network and communication.

A new world view

If we want to reconsider, as I consider essential, the ability to move to continue the journey towards emancipation from the state of economic and political subordination that continues to severely affect the lives of billions of human beings, we must ask ourselves seriously the problem of building a new imagery and a more adequate vision of the world to propose.
A new imagery and a new vision of the world, while taking up the issues and especially the way by which the universe began: cultural, experimental, thought and struggle of the Left, at the same time be able to go further, to redefine the type companies to seek, ways and methods of living and quality of social relations, the forms and substance of ethics to serve as a substrate to which "society" is to be realized. Since the need for emancipation is in no way outclassed or exceeded, since we are not yet free, as we continue to be subject, forced, trapped, blackmailed, marginalized and conducted under conditions to sellers, the themes and values to which we took home at the left, inside of which was also born anarchism, are not gone. Achieving social equality, in the recognition and appreciation of differences and diversity, solidarity as the basis of social participation and effectual as a basis for decision-making methods, value-goals are still stronger than ever.
Emancipatory anarchism completes this framework by adding the value of every individual, as its unique existential value, and the overcoming of command and hierarchical structuring of oligarchic for collective decisions. We must be aware that unlike full forms are definitely gone down the methods of the old Left and proposals for achieving them. What is still euphemistically called the left has for decades completely detached from anything that might be part of a process of emancipation.
It does not represent anything but his own self. The possibility of emancipation, which from the French Revolution onwards was a beacon of light of the way in the past and the oppressed, can catch his breath, trust and more effective if takes foot with a general awareness that all options are only authoritarian trappings that can only lead to the most complete failure, as the history of socialism has so far amply demonstrated.
Libertarianism instead has a very good historical reference: the Spanish revolution of 1936, an example of an alternative anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian. Before being violently repressed during the brief period when it could occur involving a few million people, has shown that other companies, based on values of social freedom, solidarity, and collective wealth of a self-managed decision-making, can work well. Unlike the authoritarian state socialism collapsed because unlike unable to function. We must strive for a new imaginary self-empowerment and a new worldview.
We must begin to see the progress of humanity not as a struggle to subdue nature, as has so far been because it has always outweighed by the boost to the domain and dominion over all things and beings, but as the ratio eventually integrated with the natural environment because part of it, so that when you think how to organize the society in which we live, no longer has the look of a restricted social life purely of the human species that is imposed on the rest, but rather as part of a much wider social, of which we are inextricably part. It is the vision of a new humanism that is emancipated, because most can not conceive of himself as ruler of the world and the universe, but as part of a broad "unity in diversity", to put it as Bookchin does.