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No, no, no! I am the purest anarchist! [30 Apr 2005|12:28am] Part 2 (of 4) SM: What about all these new small European countries that are now part of the European Union? The EU is a new monster: incredibly bureaucratic, with a huge administrative apparatus. What do you think about the Union? HB: When I used to go to Europe in the 1990’s and talk against the EU, most of the leftists and of course all the liberals couldn’t understand what I was talking about. “Why are you against the EU?” Because I’m an anarchist, goddammit! Any big government entities are bad news. You’re absolutely right. SM: And Europe is not self-sufficient. They get oil and energy from elsewhere, and they are a significant part of this global economy utopia, exchanging their overrated currency for Chinese-made toilet-seats and other goodies. HB: What I am saying is not a real solution – even for America. It’s just a tactic that presents itself at the moment, because so many people are disgusted and fed up with America. And so this idea seams to have some appeal. But I know that this is not a utopian solution. My point is that I don’t see - in America especially - any so called “leftist institutions” working towards a more realistic political solution. In Europe, you have the remnants of the Left: you still have some powerful unions, you have the social welfare system still, to a certain extent, surviving  - in some countries better than in others, but still very good compared to America. I don’t know… I get a little envious of that – living here and knowing Europe pretty well – I have a feeling of envy that there you could be an anarchist and still have healthcare. This would be kind of nice in my old age. But, of course, you’re quite right – living in Europe for more than a couple of years, you begin to realize that there’s a certain death in the air that accounts for this bourgeois comfort that extends even to the former working class. And a big deal has been cut and the deal stinks. It’s all a matter of comparison: when I think how fucking awful it is in America, then the European model looks a bit better. When I think how fucking awful the European model is – then I don’t know what to think because, where is the realistic alternative? As anarchists, we have to ask ourselves what exactly are we proposing that has a realistic chance even if changing the lives of a few people, much less of whole countries or the world. And too much anarchist purism - I call it “futilitarianism” --  it’s like “Oh, we don’t want to hear about those ideas, because those ideas might work, and we prefer being right to getting anything done”. Since everyone has a totally different idea of what’s right, we spend our time fighting with each other. Here in America all the anarchists are just tearing up each other’s throats up over ideology! We claim to be post-ideological and we spend all our time bickering about ideology. “I am the pure anarchist! – No! I am the pure anarchist! – No, no, no! I am the purest anarchist!” ( Read more... )

Holy Bandits [30 Apr 2005|12:56pm] [ music | Учитель Ботаники -- От Зари до Зари ] Сфотографировал в Филадельфии в середине марта: ( Read more... )

How many times do we have to educate these fucking fools? Don't they ever learn? [30 Apr 2005|01:15pm] Продолжаем разговор: Part 3 (of 4) Part 1, Part 2 Sasha Miltsov: Now here comes a question about the Net. You’ve been skeptical about the Internet and it’s true that Internet is like a giant zoo in which you can see everything and everyone: all these anti-corporate people, for example, are there and very active. Radicals of all kinds and flavors are “active on-line” and yet there’s very little happening outside the Net. What is the problem? Hakim Bey: The problem seems to be that the Internet is sucking away any energy that would have gone into real action but which instead goes into the “symbolic discourse” - but even more so because now you have interactivity and the “many-to-many” bullshit, so that you have the illusion of accomplishing great things: “O! We have a million hits on our peace website!” And a million people on the march!” And still nothing happens. And everybody scratches the head and says: “Well, maybe we need to get the message even wider. We need to educate the new generation.” “Education! Education!” I’m so sick of hearing about education. How many times do we have to educate these fucking fools? Don’t they ever learn? I’m tired of information. I don’t want any more information. I have lots of information - far more than I can ever process myself in news. I would like to be able to refuse information - not get more and more, and more, and more of it; because when you’re addicted to information you never do anything with it. You don’t do anything… period! You just sit in front of your screen, interacting with various blogs, forums and websites. Great political ideas, sure, and bad ones, and everything you like and then what? Basically, it’s just another technological fix. A new need is created by capitalism. Everybody now needs it. And so what? What’s the next chapter? The next chapter is nanotechnology or genetic manipulations and so on, and so on, and so on, ad infinitum. Obviously, what’s missing is some kind of a sharp revolutionary concept – I try to use this word in the broad, general sense removed entirely from its historical dimensions. But without something along those lines, something has to replace the movement of the social, which is dead. Thatcher said it: “There is no alternative; there is no such thing as society.” And it looks like she was right as far as we can tell, unless you can prove her wrong. ( Read more... )

People who want MTV [30 Apr 2005|07:39pm] [ music | Глюкоза -- Невеста ] Ура, доделал: Part 4 (of 4) Part 1, Part 2 Part 3 Hakim Bey: I don’t understand, can you explain to me how can people live on 26 dollars a month in Russia? Apparently, there are many people like that. How is it possible? How do they do that? Are there some remnants of Communism? Sasha Miltsov: Well, it’s not exactly 26 dollars. But if it’s outside Moscow it can very well be 100-150 dollars a month. How do people survive? First of all, most of the people still have their apartments from the Soviet times, when they got them for free or almost for free. And so they don’t pay rent, only the utilities. The other thing that helps is the “dacha”. People are growing their own fruits and vegetables. And of course, relatives are helping each other. In Moscow and to a certain extend in St-Petersburg it’s different, you have a few thousand of extremely rich people making money on oil, gas, retail, speculations and the overall misery. And then they have a whole community of people serving their needs: lawyers, bankers, managers, journalists, cleaners, guards, and so forth, who are rather well paid. And then you have the lackeys of the lackeys  with an incredible amount of brown-nosing, of course. That’s why there’s so much hatred and envy towards Moscow. It’s utterly disgusting. But the TV is always there to explain and entertain. People are literary glued to the “blue screens” with the never-ending police soap operas and the latest news from the world of oligarchs or the criminal series that make it look that the good brave police is hunting down the criminals out there distorting the fact that they are in fact protecting the criminals in here – that is the legal criminals who write the laws. HB: Very much like American television. SM: Yes, but with a special “Russian flavour”. People are completely mesmerized by TV, like rats by a flute. It could be a guy who’s practically selling his last shirt to feed himself and yet he would not miss “the latest news” murmuring about “stability” and “growth”. HB: That’s what I was thinking earlier today. The big thing of my lifetime is television, because cars were already there when I was born but I wasn’t born into a house with television. And since then the whole world has been televisualized. There was a time when South Africa was the only country that didn’t have television – for obvious reasons, not the good reasons but the bad reasons. Now everybody has got it and that’s it, that’s the end. This is the end of human society. You can’t have television and human society, as far as I can make out. And a car, of course, completes that by making it possible for human society to physically disperse itself into nothingness. So, first you have a mental dispersion and then a physical dispersion. The car and the television - these are the two 20th century big things and that’s my lifetime. It’s the story of my life. It’s much more significant than all the wars and the killings that occurred in that lovely 20th century. If there are historians 200-300 years from now that’s what they will be talking about: these technological things. ( Read more... )

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