| sebastian on Tue, 31 Mar 2020 15:25:41 +0200 (CEST) |
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| <nettime> economy or life |
ECONOMY OR LIFE https://lundi.am/IMG/arton2929-resp1440.jpg "- Can't you see, can't you all see, you speakers, that it is we who are dying, and that here below the only thing that really lives, is the Machine? We created the Machine, to fulfill our will, but we can no longer bend it to our will. She stole our sense of space and our sense of touch, she blurred all human relationships and reduced love to a carnal act, she paralyzed our bodies and our wills, and now she forces us to venerate her." - EM Forster, The Machine Stops (1909) Not everything is pretended in the official communication. In the midst of so many disconcerting lies, it happens that the present rulers have visibly tight hearts, and it is when they detail how much the economy is suffering. The old people who are left to suffocate at home so that they do not enter into ministerial statistics or that they come to clutter the hospital, certainly, certainly. But let a good company die, and their throats are tied. They run to his bedside. Admittedly, we die everywhere of respiratory distress, but the economy should not be short of oxygen. For her, he will never lack artificial respirators. Central banks provide it. The rulers are like this old bourgeois who, while a visitor is dying in his living room, has cold sweats for stains on his floor. Or like this expert of the national technocracy who, in a recent report on atomic safety, simply concluded: "the main victim of the major nuclear accident is the French economy." Faced with the microbial storm present, a thousand times announced at all levels of government since the late 1990s, we get lost in conjectures about the lack of preparedness of leaders. How is it that masks, charlottes, beds, caregivers, tests, remedies are so lacking? Why are these measures so late, and these reversals of doctrine so sudden? Why these so contradictory injunctions - to confine oneself but go to work, to close the markets but not the supermarkets, to stop the circulation of the virus but not that of the goods which transport it? Why so grotesquely obstruct the administration of massive tests or a manifestly effective and inexpensive drug? Why the choice of general confinement rather than the detection of sick subjects? The answer is simple and consistent: it's the economy, stupid! Rarely will the economy appear to this point for what it is: a religion, if not a sect. A religion is after all only a sect which has taken power. Rarely have the rulers appeared so clearly possessed. Their lunar calls to sacrifice, to war and to total mobilization against the invisible enemy, to the union of the faithful, their incontinent verbal delusions which no longer embarrass any paradox, are those of any evangelical celebration; and here we are summoned to endure them each behind our screen, in increasing disbelief. The characteristic of this kind of faith is that no fact is able to invalidate it, on the contrary. Far from the spread of the virus condemning the global reign of the economy, it is rather an opportunity to realize its presuppositions. The new ethos of confinement where "men do not take pleasure (but on the contrary a great displeasure) in life in company", where everyone considers anyone, since his strict separation, as a threat to his life, where fear of death imposes itself as the foundation of the social contract, realizes the anthropological and existential hypothesis of the Leviathan of Hobbes - Hobbes that Marx deemed "one of the oldest economists in England, one of the most original philosophers " To situate this hypothesis, it is good to recall that Hobbes was amused that his mother gave birth to him under the effect of the terror caused by lightning. Born of fear, he saw logically in life only fear of death. "This is his problem," one is tempted to say. No one is obliged to conceive of this sick view as the foundation of its existence, and even less of all existence. Now the economy, whether liberal or Marxist, right or left, directed or deregulated, is this disease which offers itself as a general health formula. It is indeed, in this, a religion. As friend Hocart noted, nothing fundamentally distinguishes the president of a "modern" nation from a tribal chief from the Pacific Islands or a sovereign pontiff in Rome. It is always a question of making all the propitiatory rites capable of attracting prosperity to the community, of reconciling the gods, of sparing their wrath, of ensuring unity and of preventing people from disperse. "Its raison d'être is not to coordinate but to preside over the ritual" (Kings and courtiers): it is not to understand what makes all the incurable imbecility of contemporary leaders. One thing is to attract prosperity, another to manage the economy. One thing is to do rituals, another to rule people's lives. How power is of a purely liturgical nature, this is what sufficiently proves the profound uselessness, even the essentially counterproductive activity, of the current rulers, who only manage to see the situation as an incredible opportunity to extend their prerogatives disproportionately, and to make sure that nobody comes to take their miserable seat from them. To see the calamities that befall us, it is really necessary that the leaders of the economic religion are the last of the nullards in matters of propitiatory rites, and that this religion is in fact only an infernal damnation. So here we are at a crossroads: either we save the economy, or we save ourselves; either we get out of the economy, or we let ourselves be enlisted in the "great shadow army” of those sacrificed in advance - the very 1914-18 rhetoric of the moment leaves absolutely no doubt on this point. It's the economy or life. And since we are facing a religion, it is indeed a schism. States of emergency everywhere decreed, the infinite extension of police and population control measures already at work, the abolition of all limits to exploitation, the sovereign decision of who we make live and which we let die, the uninhibited apology of Chinese governmentality, do not aim at providing now for the "salvation of the populations", but to prepare the ground for a bloody "return to normal", or rather to the establishment of a normality even more anomalous than that which prevailed in the world before. In this sense, leaders do not lie, for once: the future is playing out now. It is now that the caregivers have to challenge all obedience to those who flatter them by sacrificing them. It is now that we must wrest from the industries of disease and specialists in "public health" the definition of our health, our great health. It is now that we must set up the networks of mutual aid, supplies and self-production which will allow us not to succumb to blackmail with dependence by which we will seek to redouble our enslavement. It is now, since the prodigious suspension that we are experiencing, that we have to imagine everything we need to prevent the return and everything we will need to live beyond the economy. Now is the time to nurture the complicity capable of limiting the impudent revenge of a police force that knows it is hated. It is now that we must deconfine ourselves, not by simple bravado, but step by step, with all the intelligence and attention that befits friendship. Now is the time to elucidate the life we want - what this life requires to build and destroy, with whom we want to live and with whom we no longer want to live. No care for leaders who arm themselves for war against us. No "living together" with those who let us die. We will have had no protection for the price of our bid; the social contract is dead; it's up to us to invent something else. The current rulers know very well that, on the day of the deconfinement, we will have no other desire than to see their heads fall, and that is why they will do everything so that such a day does not take place, to diffract, control, differentiate the exit from containment. It is up to us to decide when and under what conditions. It is up to us to shape the aftermath. It is up to us to draw the technically and humanly practicable paths out of the economy. "We get up and break up," said a Goncourt deserter not so long ago. Or to quote an economist who sought to detox from his religion: "Greed is a vice; it is a mischief to extort usurious profits; love of money is abhorrent; they walk more surely on the paths of virtue and wisdom, those who care less about tomorrow. Once again we will come back to estimate the ends more than the means, and to prefer the good to the useful. We will honor those who can teach us to pick the present moment in a virtuous and good way, the exquisite people who know how to enjoy things in the immediate future, the lilies of the fields which neither weave nor spin." (Keynes) https://lundi.am/L-economie-ou-la-vie translation: google --==============�70755105118810483=Content-Type: message/rfc822 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: confirm 0668db99103dfabca4d4d3ee041e1e4000dfc982 Sender: [email protected] From: [email protected] Date: Tue, 31 Mar 2020 13:06:58 +0200 Message-ID: <[email protected]> If you reply to this message, keeping the Subject: header intact, Mailman will discard the held message. Do this if the message is spam. 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