[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> Apprentices of God vs Earths devotees

["Joseph Franklyn McElroy Cor[porat]e [Per]form[ance] Art[ist]" <joseph@electrichands.com>]

Let us not replace one ism with another ism.  I am tired of barking back at 
dogs.  How about we do something to create networks of independent business 
people, with no desire to rule anything other than their own lives, make these 
networks more efficient at the knowledge economy than industrial-age 
corporations, then watch as one-by-one, global industrial giants become the 
local behemoths they were meant to be (after all, we do need power plants).  

-- 
Joseph Franklyn McElroy 
Cor[porat]e [Per]form[ance] Art[ist]
Electric Hands, Inc
www.electrichands.com
212-255-4527
Electrify your sales, Electrify your Mind


Quoting "Desde AmXrica, con amor" <desdeamerica@yahoo.com>:

> What capitalism and zapatism have in common? Why they
> could share a long fight not only in Chiapas? How
> people involved in progressive movements could
> position and act in this context?
> 
> (The Spanish version of this article can be found
> here:
> http://lawebespiral.org/desdeamericaconamor/contenido.php?id=43
> )
> 
> 
> Apprentices of God vs Earth’s devotees
> 
> Let’s consider some suppositions as being true.
> Capitalism is not only an economic system and zapatism
> is not only an indigenous revolt. The power of
> capitalism is not as infallible as it shows and the
> strength of zapatism is not restricted to a part of
> Chiapas.
> 
> With all its differences, capitalism and zapatism have
> some basic coincidences. Both are revolutionary
> movements that feel themselves as old as time and both
> are in the beginning of a phase they consider decisive
> in the framework of their respective utopian horizons.
> As all good revolutionary movements, both justify
> themselves in a remote past, mythical, simultaneous to
> the birth of humanity, to which they pretend to return
> once their transformations are completed. Both have
> freed themselves from the limitations of individual
> people and structure themselves on collective bodies
> that work with agendas that go far beyond a person’s
> lifetime.
> 
> 
> Capitalism and its Knowledge Society
> 
> In the beginning liberalism relied in our condition of
> animals fighting for the survival of the fittest, so
> its was told by darwinist theories of evolution. It
> was also maintained by a strong individualism, which
> led to the interpretation of this evolutionary fight
> in individual terms (each one of us competes with the
> rest to see who is the strongest) and not from a human
> specie perspective (closer to reality: species compete
> between them, individuals of the same species
> cooperate between them).
> 
> Another myth combined with the previous ones: the
> return to the Paradise we were expelled from. Not in
> vane has capitalism been gestated in Jewish-Christian
> cultures. That was the objective of the Industrial
> Society: progress to suppress physical effort,
> eliminate diseases and transform shortage into
> abundance. Get back all that we lost because of that
> small apple bite.
> 
> In a theoretical level, the industrial achieved those
> objectives, even though this present day they haven’t
> been put into practice. Among other things because
> classic liberalism mutated into global capitalism and,
> instead of finishing the tasks of the Industrial
> Society it preferred to leave the work half-done in
> order to create the Knowledge Society.
> 
> Or in other words, not settling with returning to
> Paradise as redeemed sinners, the industrial elite has
> opted to commit the most devilish of sins: aspire to
> become gods.
> 
> Elongate and design the lives of humans, control and
> recreate Nature, understand the origins of matter and
> the Universe in order to obtain the keys that allow
> its domestication, build worlds and virtual realities,
> surpass the limits of speed and time to live in and
> dominate an eternal present. Be immortals, grasp in a
> fist the keys of creation and control from a distance
> everything that surrounds us. That is the utopian
> horizon of the Knowledge Society.
> 
> The capitalist rising occurred on the moment
> corporations became insurgents of the limitations of
> States. Corporations are the collective bodies that
> can confront this march towards divinity. Freed from
> the barriers of the minds of lonely individuals and of
> the phases of a single lifetime, these organisms grow
> through generations of humans, progressively,
> uninterrupted.
> 
> Their presence in our environment manifests in the
> form of omnipresent and omniformed trademarks and
> logos, like the Holy Trinity and the image of the
> cross were in the old days. These collective
> individuals are propelled by a breed of humans willing
> to transcend far beyond their humanity. At an
> individual level they collaborate internally. At a
> collective level corporations compete between them
> respecting some common principles, while submitting
> the rest of the mortals, even more mortals.
> 
> The revolutionary insurgence of capitalism bases
> itself in money and the market. “To us, everything; to
> the rest nothing.”
> 
> 
> Zapatism, to give it a name
> 
> The zapatism of Chiapas came to the public eye on 1994
> after more that a decade working in the shadows of
> misery. But behind the label of ‘zapatism’ operates a
> vision of humanity and its function in the world that
> has existed in every moment of history, in various
> places of the planet.
> 
> Zapatism justifies itself in a belonging of men to the
> Earth, creating a harmonic whole, in organic and
> spiritual planes. The zapatists don’t feel themselves
> sinners; they don’t seek the return to a Paradise from
> which they were expelled. They feel part of that
> paradise that already is the Mother Earth that make us
> born. And they become insurgents to rebel against
> those who appropriate of Nature’s kindness for their
> own benefit, at the cost of the work of brothers they
> don’t consider brothers anymore but simple instruments
> of their ambition.
> 
> Zapatists also seek contact with the divine but not
> aspiring to become gods, but living close to Mother
> Earth and leaving this world in a fusion with her.
> 
> This is the base belief of many religions, almost all
> of them. The exceptions are the three religions that
> sponsored the birth of capitalism -Jewish, Christian
> and Islamic- who interpret Nature as a gift from God
> to men, His favorite sons. Even though not by chance
> renovating postindustrial currents of these three
> great creeds are uniting that same integrated vision
> of men in Nature. And this same perception often
> becomes base belief for those people who, not having a
> religious affiliation, try to think about the sense of
> existence before ‘I’ am born and after ‘I’ am dead.
> 
> In zapatism the individual ‘I’ can’t be understood
> without first understanding the collective ‘I’. The
> individualistic culture in which we bathe those of us
> who live in capitalist environments thrives us to look
> for the key of zapatism in a vanguard of commanders
> with individual identities hidden under the balaclava.
> But the key of zapatism is in the communities, those
> little towns disseminated in the rainforest and the
> mountains. There the majority of chores and roles are
> rotary and collective, they are executed in a
> decentralized way as well as integrated, in a
> continuous way from generation to generation. In the
> communities the individual ‘I’ is born and dies giving
> it’s activity to the collective ‘I’, which maintains
> itself and gets more mature. Very similar to what
> happens in corporations.
> 
> The relation between communities is of cooperation,
> even with those who coexist with them without being
> zapatists. Zapatistas only conceives the competition
> against the enemies that seek their destruction. For
> zapatism, capitalism is the main enemy. For capitalism
> everything that isn’t capitalism will be an enemy
> sooner or later.
> 
> For zapatism, capitalism is the enemy because it
> aspires to transform the greatness of Mother Earth
> into the slave of the corporations that wish to
> substitute it transforming into our mothers. Because
> the capitalists trying to be gods pretend to enslave
> the mortals making them believe that they are their
> legitimate children and for that they owe them
> respect, their work, even their love.
> 
> The revolutionary insurgence of zapatism bases itself
> in dignity and love. “To everyone, everything; to us,
> nothing.”
> 
> 
> And in the middle of this antagonistic systems, us
> 
> We see then that capitalism and zapatism constitute
> two antagonistic projects, though nurtured with
> elements and recognizable aspirations. These
> structural similarities are what makes them
> irreconcilable, as irreconcilable as Muslims and
> Christians or Communists and Capitalists were in their
> days.
> 
> Both define themselves compatible with the two types
> of traditional powers: States and Churches. Their
> battle isn’t against institutions, at least nor
> directly. State and Church are no longer a purpose for
> them, in all cases a way. What leads one to think that
> capitalism and zapatism carry the germs to overcome
> the State and the Church as we have known them in the
> Industrial Society.
> 
> Almost all of us are in the middle of this
> irreconcilable systems, specially those of us who
> participate or try to participate in these social
> progressive movements in the process of regeneration.
> Zapatists by heart and capitalists in most of our
> actions, we live a schizophrenia from which only
> dreaming asleep or awake we can escape. Opening our
> eyes again is the equivalent of feeling once again
> that ambivalence that on many occasions degenerates in
> impotence.
> 
> The traditional left wing is extenuated, the dreams of
> that collective ‘I’ that was the working class are
> disintegrated. We live in a capitalist world without
> feeling capitalists and we declare solidarity with the
> pretensions of zapatists or similar ones in all the
> world. But we still donpt take the step that puts
> ourselves in by their side, not just affectively but
> effectively.
> 
> Where is the way out of this situation? We can hardly
> see it, out there where we set our sight we see
> capitalism. There seems to be no way out, there
> doesn’t seem to be feasible alternatives. We are
> blinded by the glow of money and the market. We are
> clinging to the caramel that capitalism has prepared
> for us so that we fulfill efficiently our function as
> mortals at its service. That caramel is the
> individualism raised to the level of selfishness. Or
> saying it in another way, the consumerism.
> 
> We are also clinging to our individual life, with its
> phases and its end on the day that ‘I’ die. The
> efforts whose results we don’t see in life seem
> useless, a waste of time. This limited perspective
> puts us in a lower level (less competitive, more
> innocent) in this battle between antagonistic systems.
> 
> Where is the way out of this situation? Maybe the ones
> closer of it are those who know how to add to the
> individual ‘I’ a collective ‘I’ of which they feel an
> organic and spiritual part (or ideological, or ethical
> if you prefer). Those who create social tissue with
> their actions. Those who conceive the individual and
> collective actions in a historical process that
> started way before they were born and that will go on
> for much longer after they die.
> 
> Those who bring up these reflections in the first
> person will possibly have a better understanding of
> what is at stake and the steps to take after that. Be
> it to turn into an apprentice of god, into a devotee
> of the earth or in any other transcendental role that
> hasn’t been mentioned here. That is your choice.
> 
> 
> More (in Spanish): Desde el muncipio autónomo de
> Morelia (Chiapas)
> http://lawebespiral.org/foros/viewtopic.php?topic=261&forum=4
> 
> Quim Gil
> 
> >From San Cristóbal de las Casas (Chiapas), with love
> http://thespiralweb.org/desdeamericaconamor/
> 
> 
> 
> 
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