<nettime> fwd : NETWORK OF ALTERNATIVE RESISTANCE - Inaugural Manifesto

[revelrytion <revelrytion@yahoo.com>]

Activists against Surveillance Cameras
Their actions can be viewed at http://www.panix.com/~notbored/22feb00.html

Originally published in Spanish by the Network of Alternative Resistance
[mailto:owner-nettime-l@bbs.thing.net]On Behalf Of irlandesa
redux_________________________
Translated by irlandesa


NETWORK OF ALTERNATIVE RESISTANCE
Inaugural Manifesto


1. Resisting is Creating

Contrary to the defensive position in which rebel and alternative groups and
movements often find themselves, we believe true resistance must include the
creation, here and now, of the ties and pioneering alternative forms of
movements, groups and persons who, through an activism for life, overcome
capitalism and reaction.  We believe that we are witnessing today, at an
international level, the beginning of a counteroffensive, after a long
period of doubts, backward steps and the destruction of alternative forces.
This setback has been widely taken advantage of by the forces of
neoliberalism and capitalism in order to destroy a good part of what one
hundred and fifty years of revolutionary struggles have built.  Thus,
resisting is creating the new forms, the new theoretical hypotheses and
practices that will meet the current challenge.

2. Resisting Sadness

We are living through a period that is profoundly marked by sadness.  Not
just the sadness of tears, but also, and above all, the sadness of
impotence.  The men and women of our time are living in the certainty that
life's complexity is such that the only thing we can do, at the risk of
making it worse, is to submit to the discipline of economics, self-interest
and egoism.  The social and individual sadness wears us down and convinces
us that we no longer have the means of living a true life, and so we submit
to the order and discipline of survival.  The tyrant needs the sadness,
because in that way each one of us is isolated in his own small, virtual and
disturbing world.  But, at the same time, men need the tyrant, in order to
justify their sadness.  We believe that the first step to be taken against
sadness (the manner in which capitalism is present in our lives) is the
creation of concrete ties of solidarity.  Breaking the isolation, creating
solidarity, is the beginning of a commitment, of an activism that no longer
operates "against," but rather "for" life, happiness, through the liberation
of potency.

3. Resistance is Multiplicity

The struggle against capitalism, which cannot be reduced to the struggle
against neoliberalism, implies practices of multiplicity.  Capitalism has
invented a single, one dimensional world, but that world does not, "in
itself," exist.  It requires our submission and our agreement in order to
exist.  That unified world - which is a world become merchandise - is
opposed to the multiplicity of life.  It is opposed to the infinite
dimensions of desire, of imagination and of creation.  It is opposed,
fundamentally, to justice.  That is why we believe that every struggle
against capitalism that is trying to be global or all-encompassing  remains
trapped in the structure of capitalism itself, that is, globalism.
Resistance should start from and develop multiplicities, through the
creation of ties of solidarity and help.  In no case, however, should it be
a management or structure that globalizes, that centralizes, those
struggles.

4. Resisting is a Dispersed Center

A resistance network that respects multiplicity is a circle that contains,
poetically and paradoxically, its center in all parts.


5. Resisting is Not Desiring Power

One hundred and fifty years of revolutions have taught us that, contrary to
the classic vision, the place of power, the centers of power, are, at the
same time, centers of minimal power, or impotence.  Power deals with
management, so to speak.  It is not, in itself, able to change the social
structure from above, if the potency of the real ties in the base do not
allow them to do so.  Potency is, then, by its nature, separate from
established power.  That is why we think that what happens "above" is in the
order of management, and politics, in the noble sense, is what happens
"below," in the arena of constituted power.  That is why alternative
resistance will be powerful as it abandons the trap of hope, that is, the
classic political mechanism of deferring the moment of liberationÒ
invariably to a "ma~ana," to a later.  The "liberating masters" are asking
us for obedience today, in the name of a liberation we will see tomorrow,
but ma~ana is always ma~ana.  This is why we are proposing to the liberating
masters (political commissars, bureaucratized leaders and other sad
activists) liberation here and now, and obedience ma~ana.


6. Resisting the Serial

Power maintains and develops sadness, aided by the ideology of insecurity.
Capitalism could not exist without serializing, without dividing, without
separating.  And separation triumphs when, little by little,  people, towns,
nations exist obsessed with insecurity.  Nothing is easier to discipline
than a town of sheep convinced that they are, each and every one of them, a
wolf for the other.  Insecurity and violence are real, but only insofar as
we accept them.  That is, that we accept this ideological illusion that
makes us believe that we, each one of us, are individuals isolated from the
rest.  The sad man lives as if he had been flung onto a set:  the others are
extras.  Nature, the world and animals are "useful,"  and each one of us is
the central and sole protagonist of our lives.  Then the individual is no
longer a person, the individual is a fiction, a label.  The person, on the
other hand, is each one of us, but on the condition that we open our eyes to
the reality of our belonging to this substantive everything that is the
world.  It is about rejecting the labels of profession,  nationality, civil
status, unemployed, employees, handicapped, etcetera.  It is behind these
labels that the power is trying to unify and standardize the multiplicity
that each one of us is.  But we are multiplicities, mixed with
multiplicities.  That is why the social tie is not something that has to be
constructed, but rather assumed.  Individuals, labels, live and reinforce
the virtual world.  They receive news of their own lives through the
television screen.  Alternative resistance involves giving a place to the
reality of men, women, nature.  Individuals find themselves like sad
sedentary beings, trapped in their labels and roles.  That is why the
alternative involves assuming a libertarian nomadism.


7. Resisting Without Masters

The creation of a different life must involve, fundamentally, the creation
of alternatives, of ways of life, of ways of desiring.  If we desire what
the master has, if we desire in the same way the master does, we will be
condemned to repeat the famous revolutions, but, this time, in the physical
meaning of the word "revolution," that is, a full circle to a same point.
It is then about inventing and creating new practices and images of
happiness, in the concrete.  If we think that one can only be happy in the
individualist way of the master, and we ask for a revolution that satisfies
us, we will be eternally condemned to changing masters.  A communism must be
created, not out of necessity, but out of the pleasure brought by
solidarity.  It should not be shared in the sad way, that is, because we are
obligated.  The pleasure of a fuller, more free life must be discovered.  In
the society of separation, of atomization, that is, in capitalist society,
men and women do not find what they desire:  they must be content with
desiring what they find.  Separation is separation, of one from the other,
as well as of each of us from the world, of the worker from his product,
but, at the same time, each one of us from us, separated, exiled from our
very selves.  It is the structure of sadness.


8. A Politics of Liberty

Politics, in effect, in its deepest meaning, is connected with emancipating
practices, with the ideas and images of happiness that are derived from
them.  The political is fidelity to an active search for liberty.  In
contrast to that idea of the political, politics arises as the management of
the situation as it appears to be given.

Management is a moment, it is a task, it is one aspect.  But this one
element tries to be everything.  It claims the all of politics.  It demands
all the attention, and it hierarchizes priorities, limiting, halting and
institutionalizing the vital energies that transcend it.  Management is
representation, and representation, as such, is only part of the real
movement. This Ò real movement Ò does not require representation in order to
exist, and the former Ò representation Ò on the other hand, tends to confine
the potency of representation.

Revolutionary politics is that which pursues liberty at all times, but not
associated so much with men or institutions, but rather as a constant
evolution that does not allow itself to be tied down, to lose, to be
embodied or institutionalized.  The search for liberty is tied to the
creating of the real movement, of the practical critique, of constant
questioning and of the unlimited development of life.

In this sense, revolutionary politics is not the opposite of management.  In
any event, what the politics are opposed to is separation and the
deification of management.  The latter, as part of everything, is part of
politics.  Management, when it tries to be the everything of politics is, on
the other hand, the precise mechanism of the virtualization that is plunging
us into impotence.

Politics as such is nothing other than the harmony of the multiplicity of
life in permanent conflict with its own limits.  Liberty is the deployment
of its abilities and strengths;  management is just a limited and
circumscribed moment in which this deployment is represented.


9. Resistance and Counterculture

To resist is to create and to develop counterpower and counterculture.
Artistic creation is not a luxury of man, it is a vital necessity, of which
the great majority find themselves deprived.  In the society of sadness, art
was separated from life, what's more, art is increasingly more separated
from art itself, because it is possessed, made rotten, by mercantile values.
   That is why artists understand Ò perhaps better than many Ò that
resisting
is creating.  We are also directing ourselves to them, so that creation
might overcome sadness, that is, separation, so that creation might free
itself from the trap of money and recover its place in the heart of life.


10. Resisting Separation

Resisting is, at the same time, overcoming the capitalist separation between
theory and practice, between the engineer and the worker, between the head
and the body.  A theory that is separated from practice is transformed into
a sterile idea.  That is why there are a myriad sterile ideas in our
universities.  At the same time, practices that are separated from theory
are condemned to disappear, exhausted, fated to self-reabsorption.
Resisting, then, is creating ties between theoretical hypotheses and
practical hypotheses.  Everything that knows something must also know how to
transmit itself to those who wish to free themselves.  In this way we create
relationships, the ties that empower theories and practices of emancipation,
turning our backs to the siren songs that propose that we "concern ourselves
with our own lives."  In that way, we respond that our lives Ò because they
are no longer just about survival Ò extend beyond the limits of our own
skin.


11. Resisting Normalization

Resisting means, at the same time, deconstructing the falsely democratic
talk that attempts to deal with the excluded sectors and people.  The
"excluded" do not exist in our societies.  In our societies, we are all
included in different ways, in ways which are more or less degrading and
terrible, but included.  Exclusion is not an accident, it is not an excess.
What they call exclusion and insecurity is what we should see as the very
essence of this society which loves death. This is why fighting against
labels implies our desire to make contact with the struggles of the
so-called "abnormals" or handicapped.  Different persons and ways of being
exist.  Labels act as mini-concentration camps, where each one of us is
defined by a given level of impotence.  What interests us is potency,
liberty.  A handicapped person exists only in a society which accepts the
difference between the strong and the weak.  If we reject this, which is
barbarism, we will not be able to retain the classification, the selection,
of capitalism.  That is why the alternative implies a world where each one
of us assumes his or her fragility, and where each one of us develops what
he can, with others and for life.  We know, for example, the incredible
richness of the deaf culture, created once men and women of courage learned
how to break out of the prison of medical taxonomy.  Similarly, the struggle
against the psychiatrization of society, and so many other struggles which,
far from being small struggles for a bit more space, are real creations
which enrich life.  For that, we are also inviting groups in struggle
against the medical-social normalization discipline to resist with us.

There are similar occurrences with the forms of the subjects themselves in
the educational systems.  Normalization operates here as a constant threat
of failure or unemployment.  On the contrary, there exist parallel,
alternative and diverse experiences regarding schooling, in which problems
tied to education are deployed in a different logic.

The handicapped, unemployed, pensioners, marginalized cultures, homosexuals:
   these are all forms of sociological classification that operate to
separate and isolate, based on impotence, on what they cannot do, rendering
unilateral and poor what is multiple, rich, what can be viewed as full of
potency.


12. Resisting Retreat

Resisting is also rejecting the temptation of a retreat to identity, which
separates nationals from foreigners.  Immigration, the migratory flows, are
not a problem.  They have been a profound reality of humanity forever, and
will be so forever.  It is not about being philanthropically good to
foreigners.  It is about desiring the richness that mestizaje produces.
Resisting is creating ties among those "without" Ò without homes, without
work, without papers, those without dignity, those without land, all those
without who do not have the "right skin color," the right sexual practices,
etcetera.  A union of those without, a fraternity of those without, not in
order to be "with," but in order to build societies where those without and
those with no longer exist.


13. Resisting Ignorance

Our societies, which purport to being scientific cultures are, in reality Ò
from an historical and anthropological perspective Ò the societies which
have produced the highest level of ignorance that the human odyssey has
known.  If all societies have technicians, our society is the first to be
actually possessed by technology.  Ninety percent of our contemporaries are
incapable of knowing what happens between the moment they push the buttons
and the moment in which the desired effect is produced.  Ninety percent of
our contemporaries know nothing about almost all the means and mechanics of
the world in which they live.  Thus our culture produces ignorant men and
women, who, feeling exiled from their environment, are able to simply
destroy it.  The violence of this exile is such that humanity, for the first
time, finds itself facing the real and concrete Ò perhaps inevitable Ò
possibility of its destruction.  They tell us that, given the complexity of
technology, men should accept it without understanding it.  The ecological
disaster, however, demonstrates that those who believe they understand
technology are far from managing it.  It is urgent that collectives, groups,
socialization forums of knowledge, be created, so that men can once more
have their feet in the real world.  Nowadays, genetic technology is putting
us on the edge of a selection among human beings according to criteria of
productivity and profit.  Eugenics, in the name of the good, dehumanizes
humanity.  They tell us, from the screens that order our lives, that we can
already proceed to cloning a human being, and our sad, disoriented humanity
does not know what a human being is.  These are deeply political questions
which should not be left in the hands of technicians.  The public man should
not turn into the technical man.


14. Resistance is Constant

Resisting is affirming that, contrary to what we might believe, liberty will
never be a point of arrival.  Hope, paradoxically, plunges us in sadness.
Liberty and justice exist only in the here and now, in and through the paths
which build them.  There is no good master or utopia fulfilled.  Utopia is
the political name of the very essence of life, that is, constant evolution.
This is why the objective of resistance will never be power.  Power and the
powerful are themselves condemned to not being able to distance themselves
too far from what a people desire.  That is why it is always a slave
mentality to believe that the power decides what is real in our lives.  That
is why the sad man Ò we would say Ò needs the tyrant.  It is not enough to
ask those men who hold power to dictate such and such a law, separate from
the practices of the social base.  We cannot, for example, ask a government
to dictate laws of solidarity with foreigners if we do not built this
solidarity in the social base.  Law and the power, if they are democratic,
should reflect the state of the real life of society. That is why our
problem is not whether the power is corrupt and arbitrary.  Our problem and
our challenge is the society that this power reflects. Our task, as free men
and women, is to see that ties of solidarity exist, of liberty and
friendship, which truly prevent the power from being reactionary. There is
no liberty other than the practice of liberation.


15. The Alternative is Struggle

One cannot truly be anti-capitalist and accept, at the same time, the images
of happiness and fulfillment which the system itself generates.  If one
desires to be like the master, to have what the master has, one is in the
position of being a slave.  The path of liberty is incompatible with the
master's desire.  It is exactly from the resistance that other images of
happiness and liberty arise, alternative images, tied to creation and
communism.

Desiring the master's power is the opposite of desiring liberty. And liberty
is to become free, it is struggle.  The building of ties increases potency.
Capitalist separation diminishes it.  The struggle for liberty is now
communist struggle to recover and increase potency.  Capitalism, on the
contrary, operates by abstraction, by serializing and reification, breaking
down ties and plunging them into impotence.  That is why the struggle for
liberty and democracy is a constant becoming, never finding a definitive
incarnation.  That is why the struggle is always finding potency, building
ties, nurturing the desire for liberty in each specific situation.


16. Worker Resistance

Resistance and the creation of new societies demands that we look at the
same time at the question of the so-called revolutionary subject, that is,
the working class, messianic character within modern historicism. Contrary
to what postmodern sociologists say about complexity, the working class is
not disappearing.  The workers' function has simply been displaced and
arranged geographically.  Thus, if there are numerically  fewer workers in
the central countries, production has been displaced to the so-called
peripheral countries, where the brutal exploitation of men, women and
children guarantees enormous profits to capitalist companies.  And so, in
the central countries, through evoking insecurity and fear, they propose
national alliances to the popular classes, in order to better exploit the
third world.  We are saying that capitalist production is a dispersed,
unequal and combined production.  That is why the struggle, the resistance,
must be multiple, but, at the same time, one of solidarity.  Individual or
group liberation does not exist.  Liberty is conjured only in universal
terms, or, said in another way, my liberty does not end where another's
begins.  My liberty, rather, does not exist without the other's.  We think
that, if a revolutionary subject does not exist, multiple revolutionary
subjects, of all sorts, do exist.  These days we are seeing the flourishing
of coordinadoras, collectives and workers groups, inundating group struggles
with their demands.  These struggles must, in each singularity and in each
specific situation, transcend the master's labels, that is, they must reject
the separation between the employed and unemployed, between nationals and
foreigners.  Not because the employed person, the national, the man, the
white, is being charitable with the unemployed, the foreigner, the woman,
the handicapped, the minor, but because every struggle which accepts and
reproduces these differences Ò it must be said clearly and once and for all
Ò is a struggle, however violent it might be, that respects and reinforces
capitalism.

But the workers' function is displaced in another sense. From the classic
factory as a privileged physical space constituting value, to the social
fabric, in which capital assumes the task of coordinating and subsuming each
and every one of the social activities.  Value is dispersed throughout all
of society.  It circulates through all the multiple forms of work.
Capitalist accumulation is expanded to the entire society, and, therefore,
it can be sabotaged at any point in the circuit, through acts of rebellion.
Work adds value to the world in multiple ways, through the combination of a
complex of purely technical, professional, administrative and creative
tasks, whether manual or intellectual.  In the base of the entire process is
the strength of cooperation as the productive force of value.


17. Work and Not Working

Part of the building of the hierarchies and classifications that they impose
on us stem from the confusion of the technical division of work and the
social division of work.  We understand two different things under the
notion of work.  On the one hand, a constituent activity, anthropological or
ontological, of man, the totality of social relationships that make us up,
the materialistic perspective of society and history.  But, on the other
hand, work is that duty, alienating, that modern slavery under which capital
separates us into classes.  It is that which makes us suffer when we have
and when we have not.  Abolishing work in this latter sense  is to realize
the possibilities of the communist idea of work, in the former sense.

The hierarchies that are founded in the one dimensionality of life regarding
alienated work, in employment, are those which should be broken up, opening
up the multiplicity of the knowledge and practices of life.

Work, from the ontological perspective, the totality of activities that
effectively give value to the world (technical, scientific, artistic,
political) are, at the same time, a source of radical democratization and a
definitive and total questioning of capitalism.


18. Resisting is Constructing Practices

Resisting is not, then, having opinions.  In our world, contrary to what is
believed, there is not a "single way of thinking." There are innumerable
different ideas.  What happens is that different opinions do not imply
really alternative practices.  Those opinions, therefore, are only opinions
ruled by the single way of thinking, or by the single practice.  This
mechanism of sadness, which makes us have different opinions and single
practices, must be stopped.  Breaking with the world of the spectacle means
no longer being spectators of our own lives, spectators of the world.
Attacking the virtual world Ò this world that needs to discipline us, to
serialize us, that needs each and every one of us to be in front of the
television at the same hour in order to inform us Ò is not, then, saying how
the world, the economy, education, should be, in an abstract way.  Resisting
is building millions of practices, of resistance groups that will not allow
themselves to be trapped by what the virtual world calls "seriousness."  To
be truly serious is not to think globally and confirm our impotence.  To be
serious involves building, here and now, the networks and ties of resistance
that will free life from this world of death.  Sadness is profoundly
reactionary.  It is understandable, but it is still reactionary.  Sadness
makes us impotent.  Liberation is, ultimately, also liberation from the
political commissars, in short, from all these bitter and sad liberating
masters.  That is why resisting is also this invitation to create networks
that will take us out of isolation.  The power wants us isolated and sad.
We know how to be happy and in solidarity.  It is in this sense that we do
not recognize activism as an individual choice.  We all have a particular
level of commitment.  Activists and independents do not exist.  We are all
tied together. The question is in knowing, on the one hand, what degree of
commitment one has, and, on the other, what side of the struggle one is
committed to.


19. Connecting is Empowering

It is absolutely essential to reflect on our practices.  To think about
them, to make them visible, intelligible, comprehensible.  To be able to
conceptualize what we are doing is part of the legitimacy of our constructs,
and, in addition, of the socialization of knowledge between those who think
doing, and those who do thinking.  To ourselves be readers, thinkers and
theoreticians of our practices, in order to avoid our becoming impoverished
with normalizing readings. To be capable of valuing our work.


20. Resisting is Creating Ties

This manifesto is not an invitation to join a program, or even less an
organization.  We are simply inviting men an women, groups and collectives,
who feel themselves reflected in these concerns, get in contact with us, to
tell us your experiences and concerns, in order to begin here and now to
destroy the isolation.

We are asking those in different countries who receive this manifesto
through different means to photocopy it or to distribute it through whatever
means they have at their disposal.

For our part Ò without limiting ourselves or rejecting methods such as the
Internet Ò we think it would be better if this manifesto could circulate
more concretely, from hand to hand.

All those who, singly or together, would like to make comments or proposals,
to send them to us.  We are committing ourselves to seeing that they are
circulated through the NETWORK OF ALTERNATIVE RESISTANCE.  While not
proposing to build a center or directive, we are putting the entirety of the
RRA's contacts at the disposal of compa~eros and friends, so that these
projects and dialogues do not become concentric.


21. Collective of Collectives

Many of our collectives and groups have magazines or publications.  One can
often find experiences and knowledge in them that could be of benefit to
other groups.  The RRA is proposing to accumulate them and to put this
liberating knowledge at the disposal of other groups, which will be able to
help and to empower the compa~eros' struggles.

Hundreds of struggles are exhausted by isolation and lack of help.  Hundreds
of struggles find it necessary to, so to speak, start from zero.  And each
struggle that fails is not just an "experience."  Every struggle that fails
reinforces, emboldens the enemy.  Thus the necessity for our helping
ourselves, for creating "solidarity rearguards," so that each person - who
is struggling in his or her own way, anywhere in the world, in his or her
own circumstances, for life and against oppression Ò will be able to count
on us, as we hope to be able to count on you.


22. Active Anti-Capitalism

Capitalism will not fall from above.  That is why there are no small or
large programs in the building of alternatives.



>From the Autumn of Buenos Aires, 1999.

Fraternal greetings to all the BROTHERS OF THE COAST*  Internet Contact.
"Brothers of the coast":  greetings to pirates.  Unlike the corsairs,
traders, slave traders and mercantilists of the seas, the pirates were
communists, and they created free communities.

Signatures:

El Mate (Argentina)
Mothers Association of the Plaza de Mayo (Argentina)
Amauta Collective (Peru)
Malgre' Tout (Paris, France)
Che Collective (Toulon, France)
Collective Against Expulsions (Liege, Belgium)
Social Center (Brussels, Belgium


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