Unexpected Items, Issue 2 (2)_compressed Download
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Unexpected Items, anarchist paper of beautiful inconviniences. Issue 2. (London)
EDITORIAL
In these pages, our second issue of hissing vitriol to hit the streets of London, readers will find ferocious criticisms of more than a few facts which have been promoted to universal acceptance. Facts like the inevitability of scientific progress and the great efficacy of modern medicine. They will also find noisy jubilation over some limited attacks on certain (in)famous personalities and “critical national infrastructure”.
Given that we are anarchists, it could well be asked what we think these kinds of very peripheral ideas and acts have to do with the realisation of a world without rulers or ruled? What they have to do with a revolution which releases each one’s personal powers and capacities in an unlimited way, across all the domains of life, from sexuality to food-cultivation, from philosophy to the use of weapons?
After all, a profound ingratitude for the commodities and costumes we all get to choose from is not a popular position – it is difficult to map it onto an idea of revolution based on the massive withdrawal of consent from the present social arrangement. In the end, reconciliation and broad consent are the order of the day.
But there exist exceptions which do a great deal more than prove the rule. Gut-level rejections of both the worst constraints of mass-conformity and its most appealing invitations may be hard to find, but these spasms of liberation still, inconveniently, exist. Although they are certainly the preserve of individuals who find themselves morally and materially isolated by these uncompromising choices, despite this no one can deny that another outbreak of this unhelpful activity might come from anywhere. If the last years have taught us anything it is that the diversity of those who will not be reconciled to this smirking, bloodless world is amply making up for what we are lacking in numbers.
This is exactly what this paper wishes to pay close attention to, the subversive remainder, the ‘except for’ which is left over after the list of all the horrors of voluntary servitude has finished its recital. Intentionally turning in the direction of the ‘exceptions’ is part of a life-choice to be alone along with all the others who deliberately turn their backs on what is realistic, in order to drink the chaotic expanse of all that is possible.
It remains possible to violate the fundamental laws which bind this least worst of all possible worlds together. This social order exhibits a confident entitlement. It considers itself invested with a divine and unquestionable power to defile of every molecule of the water, air and soil, to use the sum of human culture as an advertisement slot for its vile products and production, to treat even the genetic structure of the organism as its little science project. To offend that grotesque and bloated entitlement is therefore not so difficult. Even tiny pinpricks which interfere with what cannot be questioned are deeply upsetting for the rhythms and morality of the present. That’s because they are proof of the persistence of some who will concede nothing to the ‘inevitability’ of progress or the ‘reasons’ of state, not even their right to exist. Such painful demonstrations retain their subversive effect whether they are received as electrifying revelations or as hateful intermissions, because even in the act of deciding which side of that equation we fall on, we have been returned to the full consciousness of our responsibility. And our freedom.
If freedom means anything today, it’s the consciousness that daily compliance is a bargain that we choose to strike, and that other choices, those which would tear up those contracts forever, are ours to make in the same way. The revolution our age so desperately thirsts for will depend on those decisions. We wish to acquaint our readers with that inescapable choice, as generous as it is stark and even disturbing, in this and future issues of Unexpected Items.