WHAT ARE WE TO BECOME?

A plea for re:evolution in the era of war corporatism

Matt Ryoshka




i. INTROSEDUCTION


IF YOU ARE ASLEEP, WAKE UP!


IF YOU ARE AWAKE, RAISE THE ALARM!


This text is woven at what feels to many people like a crossroads in the history of Spaceship Earth’s hosting of mankind. Of course, plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. Each generation believes it is interpreting or changing the world afresh, when from another view all time runs in cycles like the seasons or the tides. Our choice – whether to live from our abilities to others’ needs, or whether to exploit others’ needs to increase our possessions – has always been the same and always shall.

Nevertheless it feels to many people today that the world is at a particular stage of crisis. This is often the case at fin de siecle moments. One revolving door is closing, another opening. Millenarian visions proliferate – climate change, famine, plague, inflation, unemployment, third and fourth world war, nuclear apocalypse. We come to the new century with the fears of the old. And we have some new global warnings for good measure: wars in outer space, and the war of inner space – the battle for hearts and minds fought in our everyday media, and the battle of the quantum and subatomic level. From the war of the worlds to Spanish influenza, from star wars to avian flu, we brace ourselves for decimation.

This fear is accentuated by the privatisation and corporatisation of our leadership. The bland are leading the blind – and soon, it seems, there may be no more water to drink whether the camels are led there or find their way there themselves. Our loss of faith in the leadership that claims to represent us is in a feedback loop with the mauvaise foi, or bad faith, of our leadership. We ask not “what is to be done?” but “what are we to become?” Feeling disempowered, we sense that we are on a juggernaut heading over a cliff, and that the drivers are too corrupt to see it.

Light, however, comes out of darkness. In that loss of faith there is the potential for the re-ignition of our faith in ourselves and our own agency, for the seeds of a renewed concept of citizenship, and for the seeds of a better generation of leaders. Another world is not only possible. It is real, and evolving everyday. Without you it is nothing.






ii. THE DISEASE

“It always seemed strange to me that the things we admire in people, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self interest are the traits of "success".

And while people admire the quality of the first, they LOVE the "produce" of the second.” – John Steinbeck



1. Today the world is haunted by a spectre: the spectre of the New World Disorder.

2. There is disorder in the world because people have forgotten that all things emanate from one source.

3. War is the sound of two hands clapping.

4. There is never a ‘civilised’ and a ‘barbarian’ in war. There is no moral difference between a Stealth bomber and a suicide bomber.

5. War corporatism is a global system.

6. An oligarchy of transnational corporations dominates the world economy. At the heart of this oligarchy is a military-industrial complex.

7. This system not only seeks to survive, it seeks to colonise. If there is no enemy on the horizon, a spectacle of one must be created.

8. The system of war corporatism uses techniques of distraction. A thousand smokescreens drift across the fields, dulling the senses of the people and dimming their impulse to resist.

9. Control of the media is control of the mind. Entertainment is frontal lobotomy.

10. First, the state is alienated from its citizens. Next the system of war corporatism alienates itself from the state. Change to that use of resources does not require protest. It requires demand.

11. Limited disclosure is a form of camouflage. Privatised politicians speak in soundbite dialects. Such dialects disclose limited amounts: they show fragments of the underlying reality on the one hand, and make the whole reality invisible with the other.

12. The double-bind is the forked tongue. The father tells the daughter: you are free to criticise me. The daughter understands from his body language and tone of voice that any criticism will lead to punishment.

13. All that is solid melts into hot air. Inner corruption is expressed in the outward corruption of language. There are no plain-speakers in the republic of Jargonia, let alone poets. Words are copyrighted by thought policemen and arms dealers.

14. The system of war corporatism is based on alienation. Firstly man is alienated from nature, and woman from man. From here a thousand other alienations spread. Each one is a cancer cell.

15. False consciousness is disconnection. If I believe myself disconnected from you, I have forgotten that you are a part of me just as I am a part of you.

16. The disease of style over content is the process whereby the ugliness of false consciousness is turned into the seduction of the image. The cannibal’s home in the woods is made of gingerbread.

17. Hypnosis by the seduction of the image is the most powerful drug of all. It promises heaven on earth while at the same time making us forget that heaven is right where we are standing.

18. Reification means that relationships between people, and between people and nature, become things.

19. Nowhere is reification more clear than in the concept of corporate personhood. A corporation becomes a person with rights and a soul. A person becomes a corporation – a set of limbs, organs, arteries.

20. Once a person has become a corporation they can be divided and ruled. This division and rule is written into their body. Citizens surrender their humanity the minute they become ‘consumers’.

21. Guns don’t kill people, little men and fat boys do. Nowhere is reification and the corruption of language more insidious than in nukespeak. Nuclear weapons – the ultimate products of war corporatism, and the ultimate destroyers of humanity - are humanised. In a history written by the winners, the voices of victims are silenced.

22. Reification and the corruption of language make violence as banal as a box of chocolates.

23. Outer war and inner totalitarianism are two halves of an equation.

24. Injustice is frozen war. Peace is impossible without a fundamental change in the way we relate to one another, to resources, and to nature. When injustice and war become frozen into law resistance becomes a duty.

25. The religion of celebrity is the crack cocaine of the people. You are not in the gutter, and false idols are not stars.

26. The myth of the war economy is the myth of the zero-sum game: I win, you lose.

27. Flat earthers of the world unite! The zero-sum game is the ill-logic we see in the rear-view mirror. If spaceship Earth is a sphere, we are all on it, and in it, together. We cannot afford the illusion of winners and losers anymore.

28. Which is better – guns or butter? In the time of nuclear weapons, we choose non-violence or we choose annihilation.



iii. THE MEDICINE

29. Theory is grey but life is green. Practise, practice, praxis. Feed the belly, not the eye.

30. You are an artist. Your everyday is your creation.

31. Glocalisation not globalisation.

32. You are the medicine man or woman. Your healing is not to be found in a pharmacy.

33. Keeping our roots in the grass. We must pay respects to mother nature instead of raping her.

34. In war, both sides lose. Instead of the ill-logic of the zero-sum game, we must change the mental co-ordinates. If you lose, so do I.

35. In our re:evolution we must see opponents as partners.

36. Climate change + nuclear weap.. an emergensea. Unless we think and act as one humanity, there shall be no more humanity.

37. Prevention is better than cure. The art of politics is the art of sensing trouble on the horizon.

38. Any movement of liberation which seeks to take power instead of giving it away is new clothing for old repression.

39. This planet is a temple, and there are moneylenders everywhere. The circuit of C-M-C (commodity-money-commodity) is replaced by the circuit of M-C-M (money-commodity-money). Money becomes fetishised. Behind that fetish lies violence. How about refusing your consent to this circuit and arranging all your affairs differently?

40. Instead of constantly desiring vacation, we need to find the paradise of vocation.

41. What do you do each day? Turn it upside-down: do it for love, not money. How is it transformed?

42. 21st century socialism = free access to the internet + the power of the soviets. Instead of a centralised Soviet Union which turned itself into a rear-view mirror reincarnation of tsarism, how about joining the soviet onion?

43. The soviet onion is the system of vegetables in elected tribunals, or novelties inside other novelties. Peel a layer, and you will find another. It is a matryoshka. When you come to the smallest, you find it has become the largest.

44. What is a soviet? A soviet is an island of integrity. It is a place where workers (or players) have autonomous control over their creation. It is non-corporate and non-hierarchical. It is temporary, and constantly re:evolving. It is a butterfly that cannot be caught in a net. You are the butterfly, and you are dreaming yourself.

45. An open net works. Never enclose the creative commons. Your funds do not need to come by hedging your bets or sitting on the fence.

46. Being independent, not in dependence.

47. Our declarations are universal.

48. All autonomous activity raises the temperature of the collective consciousness in a time when false consciousness has frozen our relationships. We do not have to wait in kryogenic stasis for the future. The future is right here, right now.

49. Instead of seeing leaders at the top of a pyramid and followers below them, we need to see leaders and followers orbiting one another in networks.

50. The leader leads, the follower follows. Reverse the relationships, and repeat.

51. The economy is the environment, and the environment the economy.

52. Less is more. We do not need economic growth. We need economic harmony.

53. The myth of classical economics is that there are limited resources and infinite wants. This myth of scarcity is a myth licensing the infinite generation of false wants and the unequal distribution of resources enforced by violence.

54. We must leave the Scare City. If we live through our intelligence and by our needs there is enough to house, clothe and feed the world, and leave plenty of time left over for play.

55. The re:evolution will not be televised. It will be audiolised, sensualised, and decentralised.

56. As we decentralise our own power, we can understand there never was any periphery. Instead of suns and shadows, we can understand that we are all suns.

57. In the old days of the universe there was a constant battle for the centre. In the multiverse, the centre is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.

58. We are the stewards of the Earth. Ask not what your planet can do for you, but what you can do for your planet.

59. Those who give power are more powerful than those who take it. The meek will inherit the mirth.

60. Man must use the force in order to be free.

61. We have nothing to lose but our gains.

62. Liberation is the withering away of the mental state we are in.

63. Another world is not only possible. It is real, and evolving everyday.

64. You are a world leader. Go to work. Or, better, go out and play!


PEACE, BREAD, LAND, LIBERTY, ENVIRONMENT