“We are witnessing the collapse of financial capitalism. This was easily predictable.
Even among economists, where one finds even more idiots than in the political sphere, a number had been sounding the alarm for a decade or so. Our situation is paradoxical: never. . .have the forces of repression been so weakened, yet never have the exploited masses been so passive. Still, insurrectional consciousness always sleeps with one eye open.
The arrogance, incompetence, and powerlessness of the governing classes will eventually rouse it from its slumber, as will the progression in hearts and minds of what was most radical about May 1968.”
ReadySteadyBook, which never fails to promulgate radical and marginalized writers and thinkers, has led me to an incredible interview with a personal hero of mine, Raoul Vaneigem, a man who, although prolific as an author, rarely talks to the press.
In this instance, he’s talking to curator and art critic Hans Ulrich Obrist about the unprecedented political, economic and social turmoil happening now in 2009, from his own unique perspective as a life-long radical, Situationist philosopher and one of the original instigators of the 1968 Uprising in Paris.
Vaneigem, pushing 80, is as eloquent as ever in refusing to compromise with thinkers who believe that profit, globalization and capital can somehow be corrected to reflect morality and community:
“The moralization of profit is an illusion and a fraud. There must be a decisive break with an economic system that has consistently spread ruin and destruction while pretending, amidst constant destitution, to deliver a most hypothetical well-being. Human relations must supersede and cancel out commercial relations. Civil disobedience means disregarding the decisions of a government that embezzles from its citizens to support the embezzlements of financial capitalism. Why pay taxes to the banker-state, taxes vainly used to try to plug the sinkhole of corruption, when we could allocate them instead to the self-management of free power networks in every local community? The direct democracy of self-managed councils has every right to ignore the decrees of corrupt parliamentary democracy. Civil disobedience towards a state that is plundering us is a right.”
Maybe it was my Santa Cruz education, or the fact that I grew up among rich, Catholic, date-raping jocks in a racist, militaristic city (i.e. San Diego) but Vaneigem’s no-holds-barred Left-of-the-Left philosophy is one of the few integral visions for humanity that still gives me hope.
I’m the first to admit that to actually implement such a radical vision perhaps requires more fortitude than I was blessed with. But it doesn’t hurt to spread the word.
Which is why, after reading this interview, you should pick up a copy of his life-altering masterwork, The Revolution Of Everyday Life.
