by
Massimo Passamani
Every day, this society of hierarchy and money produces violence
and, at the same time, a fixed system of moral anesthesia with which to support
it. The capacity to perceive it has become an endeavor as well -as
necessary condition of rebellion. Daily relations are a huge, complex game of
disguising the brutality.
The first rule is to fragment the activities of individuals
in such a way that it is impossible to perceive them in their unity. What would
the worker think if he had the totality of causes and effects of his small
repetitive gestures before his eyes all at once? The machines that she operates
produce exploitation, poverty, pain, death. But only with an effort can one
link the starving children in Africa that one saw on television with the raw
materials that one uses and the products that one manufactures. Remaining
focused on tiny push-buttons is an anesthetizing of awareness. The little
bureaucrat who fills out forms for eight hours a day does not see the immigrant
that he will deport when he is at home, because her name on that form is not
there. He doesn't see who will end up in prison because she didn't agree with
stamped papers. He has never locked the prison door on anyone, not him.
Passive contemplation toward a work activity that one goes
through in complete unawareness is the same as that which chains one to the
screen. The television viewer comes directly out of the factory or the office.
She complains about her job just as he complains about the politician on TV.
But if, while the latter spoke, one could see the people crushed by laws,
killed by asbestos, bombed, mangled by barbed wire and tortured in any police
station, if one could collect the blood, the suffering behind the politician's
trashy smile, what would happen?
The only violence that is perceived is that which is
reported. The mafia kills for money. The citizen is indignant, and the more
indignant she is, the more innocent she feels when she uses money (the great
mafia). The terrorist puts bombs on trains. The citizen is indignant, and the
more indignant he is the more he feels at home when he goes to vote (for the
great terrorists). So many people, who earn money every day, take it to the
bank and make their purchase at the supermarket, have never held a weapon, or
made a threat, or wounded, or killed. They work in insurance, at the post
office, at the custom-house or wherever; they are peaceful and love neither
blood nor bullying. Clever people. They have never wanted to see violence,
therefore they have never seen it.
The economy, in its abstractness, appears to move by itself.
This is why money seems harmless. One doesn't see the violence among banknotes,
thus it is not there. But one tries to reach out and grasp a product without
giving its corresponding exchange value, its socially established value, its
general equivalent, in short, money, in return. Suddenly, here is society
recovering its calm from its pieces in the face of violated property. The
capitalist, the judge, the police, the jailer, the journalist, the priest and
the psychologist will come to its defense. They will tell you that the value of
a thing is not your enjoyment, your activity or your need, but rather a
mysterious social measure that grants a product to you only if you also accept
its long train of flatterers, only if you accept the capitalist, the judge,
etc. They will come to teach you the value of work and the habit of seeing in
things the time that must be stolen from you in order to have them - that is
the money - and thus of making things sacred, of serving them, of measuring
your value in relation to them and not the other way around. They will come to
remind you that the respect for property is love for the human person, that if
you think otherwise, you have mental or family problems, that maybe you are
seeking the affection of your parents in theft, however you may have been
helped, raised, educated, connected. They will come to try you, to imprison
you. Or if you defend yourself, they will come to beat you, to shoot you, to
kill you. Whenever anyone disrupts the habitual circulation of money, it is
here, beneath the simulation, that the true face of the market appears:
violence. "Stealing, robbing, how is it possible?" the citizen
thinks, focused on her tiny push-button, on his files or on the television
screen in trout of him. Why illegal activity instead of work? Perhaps because
by stretching out one's hand directly for money, one snatches time - life -
from the organization of the economy. One takes the possibility for doing as
one pleases, for dreaming, for discussing, for loving, for creating one's projects
from the dead time of work. Less time for work, more time for destroying it.
Money is time. One certainly does not escape exploitation and the commodity
system by attacking property (to think this is once again to focus on one's own
pointing finger, thus, yet another ethical anesthetic). What one obtains,
having the strength for it, is a few additional possibilities. Things, no
longer measured with the yardstick of money (that is, of the extorted activity
of sacrifice), lend themselves better to experimentation, to the gift, to use,
to destruction. Work no longer appears only as the wage (the first of its
chains), but as social organization, as an ensemble of relationships. Escaping
the wage system - in the narrow sense - provides one with an additional tool
(provided that one does not allow oneself to be enslaved by the money, by the role of robber, by specialization) in
the struggle against the economy. But this struggle is either widespread or it
is nothing. Only when looting becomes an extensive practice, when the gift arms
itself against exchange value, when relationships are no longer mediated by
commodities and individuals give their
own value to things, only then does the destruction of the market and of
money - that is all one with the demolition of the state and of every hierarchy
- become a real possibility.
But when the authorities catch a glimpse of all these
aspirations behind a robbery, they raise the price. If those who commit the
robbery are anarchist individuals, the price goes up to the risk of shooting or
being killed, up to the risk of losing the time one wanted to snatch from work
in prison, up to all the additional time the magistrates have planned for them
with the additional charge of "armed band". The punishment increases.
There is a theorem prepared for any comrade who individually decides to solve
his money problem by committing a robbery, that would lock him up, even before
he is put in jail, in a secret structure with leaders, treasurers and
bookkeepers. Thus, the state presents and increasingly spiced-up account and
tries to create an odious collective responsibility in order to turn us into
the controllers of each other. Once again, illegal violence is reported to
cover up the daily, legal violence. Where an anarchist is involved, the train
of the flatterers of money is even longer. The wares are even more costly,
because what is in question is the very existence of capitalists, judges,
police, jailers, journalists, priests, psychologists, bureaucrats, workers and
robbers.
The surplus of repression is defending a whole world of
prices. No price should seem too high.