TOO MUCH OF THE anti-World Trade Organization protest effort is being cast in a defensive, even backward orientation. Under the buzzword “globalization,” we are told to “all pull together” against the unparalleled power of the transnational corporations.
We think it is no good to fight merely that latest excess or outrage of capital/technology/civilization. The liberal-populist outlook always tries a watered-down approach to reality so as to have a more agreeable tactic in organizing the masses.
We reject this manipulative, dishonest, reformist game as utterly lacking in vision. The cancer of techno-capitalist civilization is devouring everything. The human psyche is steadily more debased, and society steadily grows more pathological and empty as the natural world is being extinguished at an accelerating pace, to say nothing of the bludgeoning the Third World is taking!
It is past time to go directly after the basics of a cruel, no-future system. We want no partnership at all with the discredited institutions—unions, government, the Left—now being rehabilitated due to the “new menace” of globalization. They are part of the glue holding a rotting order together, an order that must be totally dismantled. The vista of free, egalitarian, healthy existence comes into view precisely from such a dismantling.
IN OCTOBER, a national survey revealed that virtually half of teenagers know someone who has attempted suicide. This is not surprising given that teen suicide has tripled since 1960. Now it is even unsurprising when schoolchildren murder other kids at school.
This one horrific area shows how irresponsible and trivial it would be to prepare for the WTO showdown with one’s horizon limited to a mere curbing of the power of multinational corporations. The problem, the challenge, is so profoundly more a fundamental one than that of liberal-populist politicking!
The oceans are dying and humanness is being strangled. Species are made extinct every hour while the artificial and the commercialized flourishes. The blight of techno-capital is spreading, leaving the individual ever more isolated and disempowered.
The only sensible solution is to make a break with the whole dying mess. It’s time to face up to it. It’s time to erase what is really destroying everything. It’s time to create a new world after the ashes of the ruined one.
Technology—the logic of control—and division of labor—specialization, which narrows the individual and drives the control apparatus forward—are fundamentals that must be dissolved. Without these alienations, authentic, face-to-face community becomes possible. Only in small, face-to-face community can further separations, including that of political representation, also be avoided.
Get up off of your knees during the WTO convergence in Seattle. Fight back and don’t get caught!
For more information on Anarchy, Primitivism, and Revolution, contact us: Anarchist Action Collective, PO Box 11703, Eugene, OR 97440.
