Editorial

The second issue of a magazine like this is, for us, a great success. Not only are we pleased, which would be obvious, we are also a little surprised. We were under no illusions, and still do not have any. The list of the problems we found incomprehensible, drawn up in the article “And now?” in Issue One, is still valid, although we have tried to give some answers here. Not that these answers are not satisfactory in themselves, but as we were putting them down other doubts appeared, even more complex and numerous.

The instruments used for going into them, basically the ones we have discussed many times with comrades in different places at various encounters, led us to fresh doubts as we went into some questions more deeply. Just to give an example, we were asked more or less explicitly why we never used the word “State” in the first issue although we were dealing with topics concerning problems of social and revolutionary organization, to use comrades’ current terminology.

Enough of codifications. Perhaps in our desperate attempt to do away with them we have construed just as persistent and inextricable others. The life we bring about in this world is full of duplicity, the appearances we avail ourselves of and the roles we are constrained to play are there for all to see. Many are those who live and breed this sickness within them, double beings, Januses able to flip the mask one way or the other at a moment’s notice. In order to do this they must conceal their true face, which has nothing to do with to the roles they are called upon to play. Yet they also feel a restless sense of absence and are not happy basically, which is why they tend to offload their malaise and disillusion on to others. Not only do they not experience happiness, it doesn’t even come near them. In the face of death the possessions they have accrued will fail to represent a life truly lived and they will realize that they have been chasing all kinds of ghosts, pitiful substitutes for reality.

They dissect life because awareness of unity, too strong for them, would sweep them away. The graceful dance that appears to grasp them at times is never free of fear of exhaustion. No formal harmony is possible. I live waiting to experience the rare happiness of a moment of abandon. A flower opens at dawn and my intention permits itself to be grasped, just like a flower. I slowly drag myself along the imaginary line of least exposure, a snake emerging from the sea. Poor Laocoonte, he cannot escape it.

A twofold slant. On the one hand derealization, which we are trying to understand in its aspects of coverage, emptying, flattening, overlapping and everything else. On the other hand technique in all its many forms, in a continual state of collapse, reciprocal conquests, destruction of the adversary, affirmation of self.

There is something unacceptable in the poor conception of reality that clashes with the parallel one that wants it to be improved, albeit progressively. If the latter is destined to be disappointed, like the former moreover, at least it contains the idea that the dominant logic can gradually improve relations of coexistence, it’s not just an abstract accumulation of knowledge. The first hypothesis refuses this logic, seeing acquisition as good in itself no matter how it comes about, at whatever cost. Moral condemnation of such an alternative is self-evident. But who pronounces this condemnation? Who is the moralist? In the eighteenth century formal progressivism was upheld by philosophers who invested their assets in the slave trade. The pedagogue Rousseau let his children die in orphanages. You cannot wish to improve things without taking risks, putting yourself on the line, believe the right-thinking with all their goods, their stuff to be defended. Not absolute reactionaries but those who choose the path of compromise and an illusory but less dangerous progressivism. Morality is not a collective construction, it only changes and spreads in such a way in the rotten version of productivism; but then it is a wicked epidemic not a respectable, albeit unattainable, ideal.

And we, in any case, are not moralists.