imminent rebellion #9 is fresh off the printer! (In fact we’re still high off the ink) Weighing in at a staggering 108 pages, imminent rebellion is making a come back after 3 years of hibernation as an irregular anarchist journal from deep in the South Pacific.

Included in this issue are personal commentaries from some of those arrested as part of the October 15 ‘terrorist’ raids, an overview of the police’s Operation 8, a consideration of police treatment of activists over the last few years, critiques of NGOism, activism and identity politics, and more.

Read online or buy direct from our website: http://www.rebelpress.org.nz

Rebel Press
info@rebelpress.org.nz
PO Box 9263, Te Aro, Wellington, New Zealand

Since the end of last year, our little collective has grown from being mainly just myself to five of us, housed in a little office we’ve got going for cheap. In getting started, our main source of money has come from sales of Val’s book — Against Freedom — which (sadly, but predictably) sold particularly well after she was arrested along with 16 others as part of the October 15th terrorism raids.

Our aim as a collective is to print and publish anarchist or radical material from our region in the South Pacific, and we’ve got a couple of projects underway — the most pressing being the upcoming issue 9 of imminent rebellion. This will for the first time be more like a journal, much longer and in depth than before, and hopefully we can get it into mainstream/idependent bookstores as well as to the usual anarchist points of distribution.

At the moment, we’re binding everything by hand which we’re getting much better at and which I find incredibly satisfying, superseded only by the feel of pulling down the lever of the guillotine to trim the books. (I might put up a how-to guide on binding, at some point).

In using a digital process, and hand-binding the books, we can do very short-run books, and so long as we don’t have enough projects underway to keep busy we may start doing collected readers, or reprints of classics for cheap (along the lines of the Penguin ‘Great Ideas’ series). I reckon if people have ideas for readers or themed anthologies, and are keen to gather together some texts, we’d probably be quite keen to publish them (hint hint).

www.rebelpress.org.nz

To be a lifestylist is to, apparently, falsely believe that personal decisions can be political… or something like that. The usage of the word came about in Bookchin’s vitriolic polemic Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An unbridgeable chasm from around 1995, by which point he was well past his prime of writing. From his conclusion (note the insulting use of ‘petit-bourgeois’ – you just know he has Marxist roots!):

Minimally, social anarchism is radically at odds with anarchism focused on lifestyle, neo-Situationist paeans to ecstasy, and the sovereignty of the ever-shriveling petty-bourgeois ego. The two diverge completely in their defining principles – socialism or individualism. Between a committed revolutionary body of ideas and practice, on the one hand, and a vagrant yearning for privatistic ecstasy and self-realization on the other, there can be no commonality. Mere opposition to the state may well unite fascistic lumpens with Stirnerite lumpens, a phenomenon that is not without its historical precedents.

My contention, firstly, is that there should not be an opposition between the ‘personal’ and the ‘political’, and rather that political, indeed all macro social structures, are actually constituted through practices of everyday life. My second contention is that the aim of anarchism shouldn’t be either socialism or individualism, but rather what a number of authors have called communal individualism.

The collapsing of the macro and the micro into a single field of relations and practices has been attempted by a number of theorists: this is Delueze and Guattari’s ‘plane of immanence’ and the ‘abstract machine’; it is Bruno Latour’s ‘flat social’ (a quite conservative social theorist otherwise however); and it is the turn to everyday life of the Situationists, of Lefebvre, and of much of post-structuralism. Put simply, it is the idea that when we talk of ‘the State,’ for example, we are not talking about a concrete thing but rather a conglomeration of social relations that, through their repeated performances of certain key practices and their collective orientation that is, on the whole, the same, they create the notion of the State. The State is therefore not the reified conception that some are prone to, but rather a mass of social practices in which certain key practices (ie. obedience to agents of the State, obedience to the Father) are critical in maintaining the overall illusion. The State is constituted through practices of repression and violence, but similarly through obedience and consent.

What this means is that there is no secondary sphere of political action, nor a sphere that is simply personal, but that relations of everyday life are already political. The distinction between lifestylism and politics ceases to make sense, except for the Statists who consider only those actions within the sphere of the State as political (a claim which makes no sense for those seeking the abolition of the State).

It is obvious what those who make the attack of ‘lifestylism’ are getting at. It is usually a charge of a lack of collective action, or a charge of consumer-oriented change. That it is always up to individuals to change their behaviour is always going to be the reality, but it is also a reality that freeing ourselves from oppressive social relations comes through a mass refusal to perpetuate those relations. This is not a charge against ‘lifestylism’ per se, but rather a distinction of effective action, and one which could easily be levelled against the mass marches that are so fetishised as being political, and which so often fail to count as “mass” at all. Secondly, the critique of consumer-oriented change is similarly valid but not against lifestylism, instead against naive liberal notions that we can buy buy buy our way to a better world.

Secondly, Bookchin sets up a fantastic division between egotistical individualists and social revolutionaries, and of course this is nothing but the classical distinction between individualists and socialist anarchists. The former puts the self above everything else, while the latter instead prioritises the collective. As for me, anarchism only makes sense when it is concerned with the freedom of the individual (what sense does it make to talk of the freedom of collective?), but it is both a negative freedom-from and a positive freedom-to. Certainly, the latter can only be generated through communal action. This is the notion of communal individuality, where the measure of freedom is based on the freedom of the individual, but that this freedom is extended and fostered through communal action. The development of the ego (in the Stirnerite conception of ‘the unique one’, NOT the popular conception) should therefore be of primary concern; that is, the development of selves both willing to defend their freedom, and to extend it further, à la Stirner’s ‘union of egos.’ Any ego freed from the ’spooks’ in their heads will immediately realise the paralysing and repressive social order with which they are met and that any desire that they may have for ‘privatistic ecstasy’ immediately becomes a social desire aimed at abolishing the conditions that make that desire impossible.

The charge of lifestylism maintains the division between the public and the private spheres, between the personal and the political. I believe instead that the terrain of political action is the terrain of everyday life; there is no secondary or tertiary spheres of politics or ideology. Moreover, the development of selves radically desiring of freedom is essential to any revolutionary project aimed at communal individuality, one that is opposed to the subjugation of the individual to yet another collective spook.

To the editor,

There’s been a lot of vitriol in response to the ANZAC day protests around the country, some exclaiming how little we value our “hard won freedom”, others appalled that we would dare burn New Zealand flags, and still others hesitantly supportive but disgusted at our protest on the day itself. I was one of the protesters and this is my short defence.

I am strongly opposed to the military operations in Afghanistan, the Solomon Islands and Timor Leste. All three have been justified based on humanitarian grounds of one sort or another, but it seems far more likely that, like most wars, these are pursued out of economic interests: oil, gold mining and oil, respectively, while New Zealand plays the lackey to the US and Australia.

New Zealand’s history of militarism, despite widespread attempts at revisionism, is equally disgusting: from the Imperial land seizures and assertion of sovereignty over Maori, to the Empire building of the Boer war, the defence of our biggest export market in WWI, the wars against the non-threat of the “communist virus” and the recent participation in the ‘war on terror’.

Meanwhile, every year we commemorate ANZAC day, exclaiming “lest we forget” and “never again”, words in many instances spoken by leaders of that murderous institution that is the military. And while these words of peace are spoken, the military is paraded around and applauded, guns are fired, and its current operations are celebrated. The whole event reeks of hypocrisy and doublespeak.

I will continue to protest the New Zealand military, being — as with all militaries — for the sole purpose of fighting war in the interests of the powerful. And I will continue to protest ANZAC day so long as the military attends as a guest of honour.

Produced by Smush and Slm of Aotearoa Indymedia.
Download the movie: video.indymedia.org/en/2007/04/837.shtml

Update:
Low quality version now on google video: http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-3455398513596277970&hl=en-CA
Low quality version on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CvNHlanW98

I suppose today’s morning action could be considered generally successful: the issue of the New Zealand military’s role in Afghanistan, the Solomon Islands and Timor Leste has finally been raised, and even Phil Goff was forced to acknowledge (and rebuke) the protests from as far away as Afghanistan while visiting the professional thugs there (aka the military). As well, of course, a number of people have reacted very angrily to the burning of the New Zealand flags (which I must admit was quite satisfying) and the protest in general.

The ANZAC day dawn ceremony here was quite sickening: the previous Secretary of Defence talked about peace and such with no apparent irony given his previous role as head of a professional killing machine. After two of our crew were arrested for the political protest, he then — also seemingly without noticing the contradictions — waxed lyrically about the freedoms won through war. Then to top it off, references to our Lord Jesus Christ were aplenty, I had to stand amongst a crowd singing the National Anthem to avoid being grabbed by the cops, and people actually clapped as the members of the current army/navy/airforce marched by.

I’ve covered my objections to ANZAC Day already. I only want to add that the level of nationalism and patriotism present was far worse than I had expected, and the demographics of those present – young, families, clean, white and middle class – coupled with the huge growth in numbers from last year alone makes the ANZAC day trends all the more worrying.

I also have to wonder about what I would call the “fascist personality” that was present in a number of middle aged men present, who gleefully assisted police in pinning down fellow protesters or, in one case, pinning one guy to an iron fence. After one of the cops hit the guy who was arrested in the face, one of these fascist personality types, with the intonation of a school kid sucking up to a teacher, explained to all and sundry that nothing had happened. It’s this personality that reminds me of the Brown Shirts of Germany.

The response to the protest has been quite rambling and incoherent. I can only laugh when people claim that we don’t appreciate the “hard won freedoms” that these soldiers killed for in WWI. Do they even know why WWI started? Do they know that it was little more than empire building? Do they know that NZ entered the war with the main aim of simply securing the NZ State’s primary export market at the time, Britain?

(John Minto wrote a good column in The Press regarding ANZAC day and New Zealand’s highly militaristic past, despite national myths otherwise: http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/thepress/4035148a16155.html)

In any case, this is just the start of the NZTroopsOutNow.org campaign (visit the website – I’ve almost finished it!).

Dear “Brothers in Anarchy”,

By some feat of luck it appears you have managed to gain a regular column in Salient – I only wish you would make better use of it.

I should play my cards up front: I am an anarchist, but of a variety quite opposed to the vulgar politics you two profess. As far as I can tell, you seem to advocate an anti-State right-wing libertarianism, a neo-liberalism of the most extreme kind. You reject the State and democracy but seem to entertain a misplaced belief that the all-too-obvious evils of capitalism will right themselves through some sort of unabated market mechanism.

This anti-State right-wing libertarianism of yours developed a small, short-lived, but vocal following in the mid-90s in the U.S., a following that also used the label “anarcho-capitalist”. This, of course, was to distinguish them from the vast majority of anarchists at the time who – of both the social and individualist varieties – located themselves firmly in an anti-capitalist politics. This anarchism, which has strangely gone unacknowledged in your column thus far, had its roots in the development of socialism in mid-19th Century Europe (notably Russia). It underwent an historic split in the last part of the 19th Century with the Statist socialisms (Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc.) that would eventually result in the predictable events of the Long Twentieth Century. It was also this anarchism which utterly eclipsed the proponents of “anarcho-capitalism” in 1999 in the now-infamous Seattle riots and the onset of the anti-globalisation movement.

But these semantic debates between anarchists and the “anarcho-capitalist” variety are now well-worn and tiresome. Rather than arguing who represents the most legitimate variety, perhaps it is best to go back to roots upon which we can both agree.

For me, anarchism is based upon an ethics and a desire which aims towards the maximisation of freedom. This is not simply the freedom of the tyrant to do what they wish, but instead a generalised social freedom that aims towards enabling individuals the ability to “grow naturally and simply, flower-like, or as a tree grows” (to quote Oscar Wilde). That is, it is a ‘freedom-to’, rather than just the liberal ‘freedom from’.

Compare these root values with your “anarcho-capitalist” system. While you seek the abolition of the State, you seem to quite happily transfer its repressive functions (namely its police and military forces, and their enforcement of law and especially property relations) to be managed through profit-seeking security companies. You advocate State court systems being run by businesses and using some sort of price mechanism as the basis for law. In fact, in an Orwellian twist, the pigs appear as men and the men appear as pigs. The functions of the State appear to have been retained in full and delivered through the mechanisms of the market and pseudo-State corporate forms. This vision seems more like a dystopian nightmare than anything worth fighting for.

More to the point, you seem to completely miss the oppressive capitalist relations involved in the employee/employer relationship – otherwise known as wage slavery. For 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week (or more if there are no labour laws), people will continue to endure the micro-dictatorship of the workplace. And so long as private property is staunchly defended by your corporate security lackeys, a combination of poverty and no access to productive capital makes wage slavery unavoidable (unless we retreat to sea-floating platforms as you advised us in your last column??). With profit the only basis for law, I would imagine a “race to the bottom” of working conditions and wages unparalleled by even the worse exigencies of economic globalisation today.

Anarchism must be anti-Statist and anti-nationalist, but it must also be anti-capitalist.

Nothing of your political vision seems to me to be anything that might approximate the “maximisation of freedom”. Orwell wrote that “if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face – forever” and I wonder if this might have been perfected in your politics?

Currently, there are 1,100+ ANZAC troops in East Timor enforcing democracy and guarding the elections – only the second since East Timor gained a formal political independence in 1999. Fighting has been escalating in the run-up to today’s election – understandable when the elections will ensure one of the various East Timorese factions is soon to have the apparatus of the State behind it.

Several lessons are made all-too-clear when I see proto-States like East Timor being developed and democracy imposed. The first is the most obvious and yet neglected fact of any State: its foundation and maintenance through violence. Perhaps it is because the origins of the systems of hegemony that operate in New Zealand and in most of the West are long-forgotton, or perhaps it is because the the myths of necessity or social consensus with regards to the State are so strong that this most obvious point goes unmentioned. But in East Timor we can see it ever so clearly: political and economic hegemony requires the suppression of various interests and practices that operate in opposition to its logic, and when legitimacy isn’t enough to gain this consent/suppression (as with most Western States) then force is required.

It also brings to mind the most recent Fijian coup. To guarantee the success of coup, the army needed only to seize the weapons cache of the still-loyal police force. From this point, the Fijian State ceased to be able to operate effectively at all.

But perhaps what I find should be so baffling to theorists of the State is that in East Timor we have “democracy” being crafted and enforced through the use of military. How on Earth to liberals et. al. entertain notions of the democratic State as some form of consensual social organisation when we see here in the most naked form the latent violence of democracy? In these situations it becomes most clear the role of voting as a means of legitimisation of the political and economic hegemony of the State-to-be. Elections must be guarded at all costs as the bastion of this legitimisation, and all other arenas of political/anti-political action must be shutdown, through violence if necessary.

This is not to suggest that democracy should instead be crafted through some sort of non-violent means. Democracy, even if it really were the rule of the majority over the minority – which it is not – always, in the last instance, relies on the State form in some measure to impose those decisions of the majority and suppress those of the minority that are in opposition to this (and most often the minority over the majority).

Revelation Vertigo

Stevphen Shukaitis

Autonomy is both the goal sought after and that whose presence–virtual–let us say, has to be supposed at the outset of an analysis or a political movement. This virtual presence is the will to autonomy, the will to be free. – Cornelius Castoriadis

There exists a tendency, shared across different strains of radical political thought, to see the horrors of our present as comprising a false totality, that when torn asunder, will reveal a more liberatory existence hidden beneath. This is to understand revolution as revelation; as the dispelling of the conditions of false consciousness, and a reclamation of an autonomous existence that continues to live on, albeit deformed, within this world we must we leave behind.

For the autonomist, this comes in the form of the working class for itself whose existence was disrupted, not destroyed, by the violent upheavals that formed the economic basis of capitalism (a process which Marx observes plays the same role in political economy that “original sin” does in theology). In primitivist thought, this becomes a reclaiming of a mythical ancestral past crushed, but never fully destroyed, by the weight of technological development and the machinations of alienation.

As powerful as such lines of argument can be, one danger in the politics of revelation is that every act of revealing not only illuminates the existence of certain processes and phenomena, but also effectively conceals others that do not fit within the structure of the revelation. It is when revelations become dogmatic, when they become “churchly” one might say, that they blind the true believer to all that falls outside the blinkers they have placed on their intellectual vision.

To question the process of questioning is to return to the etymological root of the concept of revolt, one based on a process of returning, discovering, uncovering, and renovating; one that is a state of permanent questioning, of transformation, of change, an endless probing of appearances. For it must be remembered that every act of revelation is not simply a discovery of what is, but also a construction of that which is, through a process of shared perception and understanding. Thus, to speak of an autonomous self-determining capacity that existed before the advent of capitalism providing the seeds and routes going through and beyond it, is not simply to uncover its existence, but also to take part in its collective construction. It is the presupposition of this autonomy, based on a perhaps mystical foundation, which enables the struggle for its realization.

The danger, or at least one of them, contained within such a style of argument, is the risk of projecting back into history some sort of prelapsarian subject that only needs to be reclaimed to bring about the end of alienation and the failings of our current existence. Fetishizing this sort of imagined past contains very real risks, as nearly none who proclaim the benefits of such an existence have ever experienced it themselves (except those who have racked up a good bit of frequent time traveler miles).

Perhaps there is a different dynamic at work here—a process that seeks to avoid the pitfalls of creating and projecting forth static utopias of imagined futures with no methods for attaining them in the here and now—although clearly this is not the only meaning of utopianism. But this is a process based rather on what Antonio Negri calls a “constitutive dystopia.”

In other words, a process based on the constituent power of the dysptopic nature of the present. A dream of a different future through the rejection of current constraints, and an implicit understanding of a life lived without those dynamics. After all, what is really so negative about this kind of backwards projection anyway? Yes, there might be pitfalls involved in that kind of mental process—but there are far worse things that could develop. One could argue that this sort of process involves a form of what postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak calls “strategic essentialism,” or to stipulate an essence in a way that is useful to those engaged in a social struggle, regardless of whether it is necessarily a true statement or not.

The danger of creating totalizing concepts, narrations, and frameworks isn’t necessarily the totalization itself. There is no need to be followed by a Lost in Space style robot that obediently intones. “Totality, Will Robinson, totality!” at the first sign of one’s appearance. For all attempts to understand the social world and its transformations, to participate in trying to pull this shaping in a particular direction, necessarily relate to some conception of totality, even if only implicitly stated. The level and scope of this totality, however, varies widely—from the often and unfortunately assumed frames of the nation-state and political revolution premised upon seizing power at this level—to a broader and more encompassing notion of social space that can vary from a very local to a global (or beyond) scale.

The concepts of the temporary autonomous zone and the intergalactic encuentro, associated with Hakim Bey and the Zapatistas, are extremely valuable especially in how they expand the breadth and range of the radical imagination. From fleeting and temporary moments perhaps taking place between only two people (in the midst of a riot or in each other’s arms), to possible relations with beings from other galaxies we are not even aware of yet, are all part of an expanding and open totality of possibilities. The same can be said for the Situationist idea of the society of the spectacle and the autonomist notion of the social factory, except that these operate based upon the rhetorical force of a constituent dystopia to work their expansion of the radical imagination.

These lines of thought employ a visceral argument about the total colonization of the present as a means to ferment a scream against existing conditions, very much in the way that philosopher John Holloway describes “the scream” as a moment of dislocation, critical reflection, and the building of vibrating intensities with the potential to undermine the conditions that cause the scream in the first place.

The difficulty of such an argument is, if all of everyday life has been totally colonized, as Guy Debord and others often argued, then how would there be any grounds for resistance? Who would resist and how could they possibly resist if they had been completely colonized by the logic of capitalism? Similarly, if the existence of the social factory is totalizing, (where there is a unifying logic of command in which relations of the factory have extended all throughout society in one unifying logic of domination) from where would it be possible to contest this logic?

What exists is a rhetorical strategy where force is given to the screaming calls for resistance to forms of domination by presenting them as contesting totalizing systems of control. That is to say that the argument is not really that everything has been totally colonized, because if that were so it would make putting forth strategies for contesting capitalism to stand on rather shaky ground precisely because it is quite difficult to make arguments for forms of resistance based on an analysis that stipulates the existence of total control while at the same organizing in ways that are based upon existing cracks and spaces where this control is not totalizing, or at the very least not to the degree that the analysis tends to imply.

It is this imaginative move, which might indeed sometimes be of the necessary delusions of resistance, which is described by cultural theorist Gavin Grindon as the “breath of the possible,” one which is premised upon making a certain leap of faith whose history one can trace as it evolves through interconnected movements.

The danger of totalities is not that we construct or employ them, but rather that we take them for the world itself, as it actually exists, rather than as conceptual tools to understand the world. The risk is that we, to borrow from Situationist phraseology, take our totalities for reality. Revelations can induce a sense of conceptual vertigo, as we dangle far from the earth, precisely because of the distance introduced and enlarged by taking ideas for the things themselves. The world, after all, is always messier than the concepts we create to understand it. The danger is when such concepts, which are a part of the reality they attempt to describe and take part in shaping, leave us blind to existing dynamics that do not fit into the conceptual scheme; when it constitutes a misstep that forecloses other possibilities that could exist outside of these conceptions.

Concepts are products of the imagination. That is, they result from the body’s interaction with the world around it. Affective traces of these interactions compose the body and what it can do through the imagination. Thus, understanding them is absolutely essential as a basis for any adequate understanding of the world, our place within it, and attempts to increase our collective capacities and forms of self-determination: to spread forth lived joy and abundance of life.

In this way, perhaps the similarities in dynamics of thought between strands of Marxism and Christianity is not so surprising. Both involve the creation of a totalizing scheme useful in making sense of the everyday experiences and affects upon the bodies of those involved, and explaining them within this conceptual scheme. For the Christian, the suffering of the present, this “veil of tears,” is explained as a result of a fall from grace eventually to be overcome through ascension into heaven.

For Marxism, the transformation of the pre-capitalist world by the bloody expropriation of primitive accumulation is a condition to be overcome by the eventual destruction by proletarian revolution. Both are premised upon what the Christian Marxist Ernst Bloch, a clever synthesizer of the two lines of argument, refers to as the “not-yet,” which indeed operates as a principle of hope for those enmeshed within such a framework, but often does precious little for those alive in the here and now. And, just as it doesn’t take a weatherman to tell you which way the wind is blowing, it doesn’t take a Keynesian to remind you where we all end up in the long run (i.e., dead).

Opposed to these worldviews that promise a brighter future “someday” to excuse the misery of the present one also finds bursts and outbreaks of demands for the creation and realization of liberated life in the here and now: from the English radical Christian visionaries, the Diggers, Ranters, and the brethren of the ever-renewing free spirit, those clamoring for the creation of heaven on earth now, to those who working toward creating spaces of insurrection, insurgency, and autonomy in the present. The totality and march of historical time is broken, ripped away to reveal modes of collective experience and joy inscribed on the bodies of those rising up.

And, as one of Flannery O’Connor’s mad, wandering prophet outcasts might correct her (emerging from the warped realm created by her gothic Southern Christian imagination), all that rises up does not necessarily converge, even if the patterns of strange attraction of the gravity of Eros to tend to warp time and space around them. A total and unitary frame of reference, time or experience—whether the spectacular time of the commodity or the spectral time of religion—is shattered and begins to become replaced by what Debord describes as the mutual federation of freely reversible forms of time. It is striving towards creating conditions for the realization of autonomy as the independence of social time from the temporality of capitalism.

This is the movement of movements, or the movement of movement itself; the constantly shifting and transforming of the radical imagination, social relations, compositions, and affections. And, this is not just the movement of what are usually considered as forms of social movement (which tends to give too much emphasis to the technicians and specialists of political action, the seeds of tomorrow’s bureaucratic class) and their recognized forms of visibility, but social movement as just that: the movement of the social. Transformations occur constantly and in often-imperceptible shifts, minor revolts and mutinies that disguise their importance beneath their seemingly insignificant forms.

This movement of an infinite totality, composed of many elements and machinations of desire that in many ways can be regarded as totalities in their own right (this is the exact point made by Hakim Bey when he argues that we begin as the sovereigns of our own bodies, but that this is a sovereignty which is socially constituted in a relation between bodies), is described with great skill by none other than Spinoza.

Beneath the veneer of what seems to be an overwhelming religiosity, the framing of his argument that nothing is possible without god, is his heretical view of what that means. For Spinoza, god or nature, is this infinite totality of which we are all parts. The foundation of his argument is an understanding our position within and in relation to this all-encompassing and infinite totality. From this he proceeds to describe the joyous and happy life, the blessed life of liberation, which is founded upon such an understanding of what is possible for the free individual. This sort of argument finds great resonance with the ideas of someone like Raoul Vaneigem (as well as Deleuze, Guattari, Negri, Castoriadas, and many others), who, like Spinoza, see desire as the essence of humanity. Whether understood as the living of happy life or increasing affective capacities through the liberation of desire, the unfolding of the everyday life of revolution, of liberation, is built upon how the everyday connects and relates to, as well as embodies, the totality of social relations and processes.

Whether a statement or conception is in itself true or false does not mean that cannot be useful to ongoing struggles. There are times where a claim of an argument being false, particularly in relation to core notions, what one might call the myths we live by, is not even necessarily an objection to it. Indeed, for false judgments themselves often are still life-advancing and necessary. As that old German malcontent Nietzsche argued, “To recognize untruth as a condition of life: that is, to be sure, means to resist customary value-sentiments in a dangerous fashion, and a philosophy which ventures to do so places itself, by that act alone, beyond good and evil.”

To live the everyday life of revolution is certainly a dangerous task, one fraught sometimes with very necessary illusions, allusions, and delusions. The presumption of an already existing form of autonomy that Castoriadis describes in the quote that opens this article might indeed not have existed until those acting based upon it already existing by their actions take part in creating it. Whether this autonomy really existed is not necessarily important compared to how this presumption, resting on a virtual and undetermined capacity for autonomy, takes part in the process of its actualization.

Such a process is not necessarily positive or negative, but depends on other processes and dynamics involved, and from whose perspective this judgment is being made. The task then is to work through how these formations occur, and whether they tend to move in directions we want them to go, or whether they come to be objectified and turned against us, where the tools and notions that once were helpful are nothing more than baggage at best, and phantoms and specters that continue to haunt us.

You and I return to the scene of the crime / Let’s go out and wash our sins away / Everyone’s an actor in this play / Trading lines with broken phantoms – Mission of Burma, “Fever Moon”