A FEW WORDS:����
On dispossession and individual responsibility
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�� Due to
the immensity of the current social order and the facelessness of the
bureaucratic and technological systems through which it maintains its power,
one can easily come to see it as inevitable, as a predetermined system of
relationships in which we have no choice but to play our role. The aim of the
state and the ruling class is total domination over all of existence, and here
in the heart of this monster it can seem as though they have, indeed, achieved
this aim. Aren�t we forced, day after day, to engage in activities and
relationships not of our choosing?
�� This
is what defines us as proletarians. We have been dispossessed of our capacity
to determine the conditions of our own existence. But this dispossession is not
an inevitable and predetermined historical development. Right now, at the
fringes of the capitalist order, in places like Bougainville and West Papua,
one can see how this dispossession takes place. Individuals with names and
face, the institutions they establish in order to exercise their power and
those who choose to obey them due to the extortion of survival act with
violence to dispossess those who still have some freedom to create their lives
on their own terms. And in the face of these violent intrusions, those who have
not yet been proletarianized often take up arms against those who are trying to
steal their lives from them. It is not an inevitable historical process that
is�often literally�bulldozing their lives into the ground, but the force of
arms of those in power. Real individuals are responsible for the social
conditions that exist. Real individuals benefit from them and, thus, do
everything in their power to expand them.
�� But it
is not just the activities of those who rule that reproduce the current order
of domination and exploitation, but also�and more essentially�the activity of
those who obey them. Here, in the heart of the beast, our dispossession seems
to be complete. Unlike West Papuans and the people of Bougainville, we have no
social life of our own creating. Every choice we make is made under duress, the
extortion of survival�s domination over life hanging over our heads like a
sword. Nonetheless, obedience is a choice. The mutinous activities in the
American military that played a major role in forcing US withdrawal from
Vietnam is proof enough of this, as are the little acts of insubordination
carried out everyday by the exploited to make their lives a little bit more
bearable, a little bit more dignified. And it is in such acts that one begins
to take responsibility for one�s life.
�� The
social order of the state and capital leaves us very few options. One can
understand when some, like Daniel Quinn, suggest that we �just walk away�, but
against a system that requires expansion this is no solution. If the mountain
people of West Papua have been forced to take up arms against the intrusion of
the civilized order, we who live in its heart can�t pretend that we can simply
run away. If we do not want to accept our exploitation and choose obedience
with the occasional petty transgression, then we are forced to live outside the
law, quite literally to try to steal our lives back as best we can against all
odds.
��
Increasingly, a similar life is being forced upon more and more of
people. The multitudes of tribal and peasant peoples being forced off the lands
where they made their lives do not find jobs waiting for them in the cities to
which they are forced to migrate. And even in the affluent nations of the
North, many people find themselves falling out the bottom. The only place for
these people is the realm of the illegal economy, the so-called �black market�.
But this is still the market, these people are still exploited and here
survival still reigns over life.
�� For
anarchists and revolutionaries, the issue is not mere survival, but the
reappropriation of life, the overturning of the conditions of existence that
have been imposed on us. This project ultimately requires the active revolt of
the multitudes of exploited and excluded people, as well as those on the
margins resisting the efforts of capitalist institutions to steal their lives
from them. But unless one has faith in some form of historical determinism or
spontaneism, there is no sense in simply sitting back and waiting until �the
time is ripe� and the multitudes rise.
�� Our activity creates the circumstances in
which insurrection can flower; our refusal to obey, our insistence upon
creating our lives as our own against all odds here and now and attacking the
institutions of domination and exploitation as we confront them in our lives
are the seeds of revolution. If revolution is the collective struggle for
individual realization (and this seems to me to be the most consistently
anarchist understanding of the term) and, thus, against proletarianization,
then it develops with the solidarity that grows between individuals in revolt
as they recognize their struggle in the struggles of others. For this reason,
and for the joy it gives me here and now, I will not wait until the time is
ripe, but will begin to take my life back here and now.
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