Address to the Living — Chapter 2, Part 6 : Genesis of Inhumanity: The Commercial Circle

By Raoul Vaneigem (1989)

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Untitled Anarchism Address to the Living Chapter 2, Part 6

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(1934 - )

Raoul Vaneigem (Dutch pronunciation: [raːˈul vɑnˈɛi̯ɣəm]; born 21 March 1934) is a Belgian writer known for his 1967 book The Revolution of Everyday Life. He was born in Lessines (Hainaut, Belgium) and studied romance philology at the Free University of Brussels (now split into the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel) from 1952 to 1956. He was a member of the Situationist International from 1961 to 1970. He currently resides in Belgium and is the father of four children. (From: Wikipedia.org.)


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Chapter 2, Part 6

The Commercial Circle

Commodity expansion has always held human hopes at arms’ length only to throw them down at precisely the place where their interest waned. Although it opens, in theocratic, feudal, or bureaucratic real estate speculating, a breach of freedom, it must know that it has already closed up on the use that the parentheses of marketability could have made of it.

What do these passions discover, by leaping over the wall, these passions that raged against the oppression of rigid laws, mind-suffocating traditions, moral rigor, neurotic inhibition? They discover the need to pay for these new rights of transgression. And so libertinage giving good reason to Puritanism, as liberalism gives justification to tyranny, as the left gives to the right, as the revolution gives to despotism, peace to war, health to sickness.

And let no one invoke here the effect of a so-called natural law: it’s nothing but the effects of commerce at play here. The preponderance of exchange has imposed its market-structure on behaviors, on morals, on ways of thinking, on society. It’s so obvious today, in fact, that every domain — ideological, political, artistic, moral, cultural, repressive or insurrectional — is pushed, by the bankruptcy of the economy, into a slump in rates, a drop in values, a weariness of offers and requests, a lack of difference between the right side and the wrong side, the modern and the ancient, the in-style and the forgotten.

The End of the Time of the Apocalypse

Up to and including its industrial expansion, the agrarian enclosure has oozed with the rage and terror of besieged life and cities. Night and day, the apocalypse looms at the gates of the city. And from any horizon, at any instant, the fire of destruction might burst up, and on would think one might sense an appeasement when at last the hordes of pillagers, hereditary enemies, rioters, etc., finally show up, when epidemic, nuclear or chemical death comes at last, fulfilling its promise.

It’s true that, living in fear of the double-edged sword, they kill with double-edged swords, and seal themselves up in the ritual of sacrifice, expiation, and vengeance. These are never anything but their own gobs of spit, falling back into their mouths. The fire that devours them is the fire they lit, or at least which starts up, within them and around them, the mechanical heating up of life reduced to work.

At the turning points of history, right where commodity expansion gets up speed and breaks the lethargy of agrarian societies, the lights of the apocalypse start blinking with greater brightness. The succession of economic crises and of upheavals that they cause has never failed to blow with their foul mouths the trumpets of the end-times, and those times have ended so often that there’s nothing left to expect from them today, whether they are happy or unhappy endings.

The apocalypse has come to pass with the century that saw, looming on the horizon, disguised as economic crisis, a crisis of the economy, a mutation of civilization. This is no longer the fear of a cataclysm which would incite to reforms and which would guide us towards revolutions that it could only pre-program the failure of. A self-confidence is rekindled little by little, as if everything that awakens people to the innocence and exuberance of life were rallying to itself the uncertain, individual and daily quest for an absolute enjoyment. The mutation that is underway will leave behind the expired cycle of a history wherein revolution and repression never did anything but obey the diastole and systole of the beating heart of the commodity in all its forms and states.

The Prehistory of Commerce

If agriculture and commerce presided over the birth of history, their prehistory comprises both the conditions that made their development possible — but not necessary — as well as comprising the life styles that such a development pushes into the impossible so completely that in order to make conjectures about them you’d have to remember the inversion of behaviors imposed by the economy taking power.

The hunting preserves, marked out and delimited by the mesolithic hunters, announced the agrarian enclosure, and still betray a predominant animalness, as much by the practice of predation as by the need to mark territory.

On the other hand, there exists a will to humanity in the art of avoiding confrontation between two groups that both covet the same game-rich region. We know how commensality, exogamy, the exchange of a few drops of blood, seems to succeed in putting together in one and the same flesh two distinct beings and communities, in such a way that the harm done to the one is also an injury to the other, and that the good of one is a profusion of enjoyments for all.

Food eaten together, couplings, the mixing of blood, operated a carnal alchemy, which all lovers from all time remember, the union of the individual and collective bodies. Chyle, sperm, and the other vital fluids distill the quintessence of the pleasure of being together without stopping being oneself.

Would anyone deny that the custom of giving and receiving food, love, and blood, which is the whirlpool of life, sketched out an evolution in the heart of which nothing was excluded that gave a basis for social harmony, and a humanity which develops its creative organization in the same way as the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms developed their adaptive organization? Is it not from there that collective memory has drawn its nostalgia for a society whose rhythm was marked by the respiration of life? A society which needs no constraints to make sure that blood wasn’t spilled everywhere, a society where love stands out and is reborn without sowing hatred and scorn, a society where the right to eat, to have a place to live, to wander, to express oneself, to play, to meet up, to caress, do not fall beneath the blows of a permanent blackmail.

The enjoyment of the self and of others, the “alchemical weddings” with nature, the pursuit of pleasure in the labyrinth of divergent desires — such are the projects that are being confusedly undertaken now, here at the dawn of a history that abandoned them to dreams, since doubtless they were incapable of resolving the problem of demographic and climactic upheaval outside of an agrarian economy that assured the survival of a few at the expense of the many.

Everything that survived clung to vague promises of brotherhood, equality, generosity, and love, which religion and philosophy guarded intently, like baby rattles, at the bottom of their bags. Their heat radiates still in the hearts of children and lovers, and even in our language we keep the memory of an original happiness, as one can see when in the most frozen of nouns there is evoked an erotic relationship: “to have business with someone”, or a friendly one: “To do good business.”

What does the unusual remnant of love and friendship mean anymore when considered in the logic, hardly-likable, of the principle “business is business”? The memory of Life haunts the very form which has stripped it of substance.

With the “neolithic evolution” of the economy, the proliferation of life moves aside to make way for the proliferation of commodities. For the symbiosis of things and beings, for the osmosis of the different species, is substituted “commerce”, in the modern sense of the term, a lucrative exchange of goods produced by labor.

The body to body feel wherein tenderness replaced bestial violence little by little no longer inspires in morals a sweetness and slowness where conflicts can be cleared up. There’s no longer any gestures, any thinking, any attitude, any project, which doesn’t enter into a relationship ordered by list where everything must be paid for by trade, coin, sacrifice, submission, reward, punishment, vengeance, compensation, debt, remorse, anguish, sickness, suffering, decompression, death.

The emptiness of an endless anguish devours the body, so naturally built to fill with life every time enjoyment fills it with joy. Its energy is exhausted by the efforts of working, its substance imprisoned in an abstract form, its gaze turns away from itself like from something disgusting, and fixes itself upon the infinite silliness of the heavenly mandates.

The individual identifies him or herself with the anonymous prices that he or she produces and which are produced in his or her name. Aside from a few passions that still holds together their lost lives, the individual is nothing but commodities — he or she has a use value, which makes him or her the servile instrument of the most diverse work, and an exchange value, to the benefit of which the individual buys and sells him or her self like a pair of boots. And so that’s how commerce has taken the place of the genius of the individual up to the present, when joblessness throws them in the reject pile, when the monetary crises devalue them, and when they assure themselves, almost by a kind of self-hypnosis, that their value is unique, incomparable, and without price.

From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org

(1934 - )

Raoul Vaneigem (Dutch pronunciation: [raːˈul vɑnˈɛi̯ɣəm]; born 21 March 1934) is a Belgian writer known for his 1967 book The Revolution of Everyday Life. He was born in Lessines (Hainaut, Belgium) and studied romance philology at the Free University of Brussels (now split into the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel) from 1952 to 1956. He was a member of the Situationist International from 1961 to 1970. He currently resides in Belgium and is the father of four children. (From: Wikipedia.org.)

Chronology

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October 16, 1989
Chapter 2, Part 6 — Publication.

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April 26, 2020; 2:43:13 PM (UTC)
Added to http://revoltlib.com.

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January 16, 2022; 11:01:58 AM (UTC)
Updated on http://revoltlib.com.

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