endgame

there will be no democratic comeback in our future. But our life is still here, collective existence still asks for a little breathing space, a little joy, a little dignity.

The triumph of a man who represents in one go the racism of the Ku Klux Klan, mafia criminal profiteering, macho violence and financial absolutism is the best observation point from which to finally look retrospectively at the twentieth century, and to some extent, imagine the lines of evolution of the twenty-first.

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https://www.e-flux.com/notes/640231/how-to-explain

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Chaos and the Automaton, published by e-flux

ISBN10: 1517917115
ISBN13: 9781517917111
Publisher: E-Flux Classics
Published: Jan 28 2025
Pages: 320
Language: English

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All the defenses of democracy have been trumped.

What democracy?

The Trump-triumph is the final proof that the workers' movement has made a colossal mistake since the end of the nineteenth century, accepting the terrain of politics as the terrain for emancipation.

Both revolutionary bolshevism and social democratic reformism have accepted the terrain that the bourgeoisie had prepared, and on that terrain they lost all battles up to the point of being definitively erased from the panorama of social evolution.

Was there another ground for social autonomy, other than political power?

Of course there was: it was daily life, collective existence, which spontaneously tends to desert economic and political totalitarianism.

Social revolt?

Today everything is lost in the field of politics, and there will be no democratic comeback in our future. But our life is still here, collective existence still asks for a little breathing space, a little joy, a little dignity.

sSocial revolt is urgent. But what does it mean?

Social revolt today means breaking bridges of subordination in the precarious work-place, multiplying points of solidarity with migrants, and creating autonomous structures of social solidarity while everything falls apart.

Social revolt means creating the structures to collectively desert the regime of liberal slavery.

Will we be up to such a task? I don't know, maybe not. At the present I would say we’ll no be able to do what must be done.

But there is no other possibility of human survival than this: desertion, autonomy, revolt.

Workers today are isolated, psychically fragile, incapable of organization and solidarity, because the political Left exchanged autonomy for democracy, and democracy was a fake and a trap.

Government based on elections could be a good idea if two conditions were met: the first is the free formation of opinion and will.

The second is the effectiveness of political will in determining the lines of development of the economy and therefore of society.

Both conditions have never existed in the history of the twentieth century.

The formation of opinion is the product of the media machine increasingly dependent on the agencies of financial capital.

The second condition - the effectiveness of political will on the dynamics of the economy, and therefore of social life - never occurred.

The economic power has always used violence in order to enforce its interests, using financial mathematics or, when this was not enough, using the army.

This was made clear when the Chilean people overwhelmingly elected a socialist government - and soon after the United States used the Chilean armed forces to violently enforce the re-establishment of its imperialist rule, and the ownership of the copper mines.

It was clear previously, when Western imperialism forcibly overthrew Mossadegh's government in Iran in 1953, Sukarno's government in Indonesia in 1964, and on many other occasions. But the assassination of the socialist Salvador Allende by a Nazi general named Augusto Pinochet was the definitive proof of the illusory nature of political democracy.

Eventually we had a final confirmation of the inexistence of democracy when the will of the Greek people was obliterated in the summer of 2015.  Armed force was not necessary because Alexis Trispras, reasonably, accepted financial blackmail and showed that democracy is what it has always been: a deceit.

Therefore the victory of the individual who built his fortune on racism and the support of the mafia is not the end of democracy, because democracy never existed.

For the same reason there will be no return of democracy, because the victory of a mafia rapist IS democracy.

As in Italy, brothers are the emerging reactionary force: the fragile males who for some decades have lost ground in the face of emerging feminism, now tend to identify themselves in the fraternity of the gym (gym-bro), in the obsession with money (crypto -bro) and in the omnipotence of technology (tech-bro).

No way out from war, racism and genocide is in sight. The white populations, divided as never before over the ghosts of democracy, are united on only two things: the defense of the border, the rejection of migrants seeking refuge, and the imposition (by hook or by crook) of the role reproductive that women have begun to desert.

Tammam Azzam: Freedom

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Extermination and compulsory procreation. This is the program.

Despite being, country by country, on the brink of civil war, Western and supremacist peoples are united in the common undertaking of genocide and in the common enterprise of enforced birthing.

Now that climate deniers hold the government of the number one polluting nation, it’s going to be impossible to reverse climate collapse: the three-degree increase in temperature is an irreversible trend, and the consequences are promptly unfolding. Much of the planet tends to become uninhabitable, great migrations follow fueling fears, violence and extermination.

For a long time we fooled ourselves by listening to fairy tales of a fantastic multitude ready to fight against a fantastic Empire: we didn't have the intellectual courage to recognize social impotence, and the exhaustion of those psychic energy without which social movements are flashes in the pan.

For reasons that are not so much political as psychic, society no longer possesses the capacity for strategic autonomy, and there is no possibility of escaping the suicidal precipice.

The only question now: how will we live?

Will we be able to create a symbolic and existential space of autonomy for the duration of the endgame?

There will be no “after”. Therefore it makes no sense to ask whether a new order is imaginable beyond chaos and war.

There is only this “during". How will we live during the spread of genocidal wars, during the unfolding of climate collapse that destroys inhabited areas of the planet, during this creeping civil war that invades every fragment of collective life?

Will we waste our time chasing the ghost of a democracy that never existed, or will we abandon wars, work and procreation, to live as happily as possible in the little time we have left? Will we be able to create collective structures of life in desertion?

Quit Everything, The Repeater