The End of Hierarchical Power

There is no domain in which authority does not degrade itself and announce the end of all the power engendered by the exploitation of nature.

Disbelief stripped the priests of the respect and scorn their ministry draped them in. God only ever shows up when he’s dug up in archaeological expeditions, and the episodical shop-floor bitching is never going to stop the collapse (at last!) of all religious enterprises.

In a few poisoned lands of the third world the last tyrants crop up. A universal discredit has buried the military dictatorships little by little beneath the shit of the past; it does a better job than the most virulent antimilitarism in giving the stink of death to the uniforms of all the armies of all the continents and of all the parties.

Nothing’s more comforting than seeing history close its dumpster-lid on the reign of the “living gods”, the saviors of the people, the providential glories, the charismatic elected officials. We should give thanks to the 20^th century for having disarticulated the iron heel that for so long held in subjection the proletariat, women, children, the body, the animal, and nature. Ah, happy time, when the heads of state, of family, of the elites, tabernacles, and enterprises tumble from their position of prestige like dead leaves, tossed about in the whirlpools of ridicule before being lost in indifference!

Having nothing substantial to put under their teeth anymore, the will to power now nourishes only toothless carnivores. Without a doubt, our modern era continues tossing out onto the market its mess of authoritarian creatures, but its more a matter of inertia than of conviction. Although the emotionally mutilated still exhibit themselves with their fiery looks, their steely character, and their virile jaws, the surrounding milieu sterilizes their seed of bitterness, aggressiveness and death. They notice they’ve no longer got any of the things that used to give them hope and the feeling they were right: the promise of a strong State, a financial empire, a national or proletarian revolution. They don’t have any guarantee anymore that they’ll succeed.

And now that the economy governs them like pawns, in the name of what, exactly, are they governing us, since the chessboard of the old world has lost all its kings, queens, rooks and knights, and there’s nothing left to move from square to square but a universal infantry? Will they play a game they’re no longer running for themselves, and if they do, what kind of victory will they be after? To start up business, the state, money, confidence again? After all, things have come to such a point that the case of anyone resorting to lies falls apart as soon as it comes up.

The people in power have lost their slave-dealers’ faith, which gave rise to royal kingdoms and republics. It seems they have kept nothing but the ancient creed of the traveling salesman/beggar, knocking on doors down the street to hawk his stock of brooms, since they have enough crafty imagination to take down the hanged man and sell him a new rope. But no! The idea has only very recently come to their minds that they could make a profit off the alarms that are going off every day signaling the presence of an endangered planet. They don’t even think about taking down the shaky monopolies of traditional industry, investing in the ecology, dismantling the pollution-factories, taking down beautifully what they built in such an ugly way, depolluting, getting rid of nuclear power, colonizing sustainable energies, federating internationally in small, regional, productive units, propagating marketable modes of self-management, in brief, to act according to the fashion of their history: the “economic turnaround” of revolutionary ide as. Otherwise, it seems like the mental state of businessmen is undergoing the tendentious sinking of the amount of power they have. Did they deeply feel, as though it were a personal trauma, the fact that the arms-dealing business is going to be unprofitable soon with the gradual extinction of local wars? They’ve still found no better way of obeying the laws of competition than confronting each other on the battlefield of the Stock Exchange. There, all gussied up as black and white knights, they dedicate themselves to making parodies of the medieval tournaments, sacks, and pillaging. It’s a shocking spectacle to see a generation of obsessional financiers popping up everywhere from shareholders’ tables with bunches of numbers and wads of cash while a cascade of whole sectors of agriculture and industry are going out of business.

In its supreme stage, capitalism is falling back into its infancy, an infancy with all the life eradicated, one that is ordinarily called senility. At the same time as these mechanisms appear in the consciousness of the individual body, the economy attains a state of pure abstraction. Its evanescence is such that it lets go of its own substance, the factories and markets that made up its material existence. What will to power could resist such a muscular relaxation?

The Descending Curve of the Economic Offensive

The rage to get a bone to gnaw on or resell has fed the will to power everywhere. Even the weakest man would protest that he had a total right to his crust of bread, his woman, his dog, his renown. There’s one character trait no one’s been able to attribute to human nature unless it’s wrapped up in a suit of character armor. The guile and evasiveness is so obvious now that the commodity has conquered almost everything, that there’s no longer any presence on earth besides the redundancies of a useless economy and a life discovering the human use of its nature. There’s no continent on earth where the commodity doesn’t push its modernity.

The obligation to consume propagates democracy at the speed of market studies, and the peace of exchanges effaces progressively the specter of the wars, that is, of the social war, at least in its archaic form. The secular conflict that arose between the exploiter class and the exploited class is undergoing the effects of the devaluation of power a little more each day.

Repression and demands are softened in the nostalgic parodies of the struggles of yesteryear.

The old predominance of the mind over the body is finally letting up in turn, like everything else. Has the technocratic market not undertaken, by promoting the computer, the transformation of the tool into a brain and the brain into a tool? The cybernetic realizes in such a way the programming set up for people by the logic of the commodity: a body and mind brought together and equalized in a machine.

Who could be ecstatic about the prodigiousness that the human genius attains when it’s placed at the service of the economy: a muscular body deprived of libidinal energy and a thinking sunken into millions of understandings, which cannot be understood outside of a binary logic, that is, with an intelligence inferior to that of rats. The marvelous is elsewhere.

The Reign of Exchange Value

As if the computer served as a sign put up in the humanitarian boutiques where people tend towards total abstraction, we see here a world where use value decreases from gadget to gadget, where truly useful goods disappear along with the cows, snails, mushrooms, and forests, where the raw materials industries are dismantled in the name of international marketability.

On the other hand, exchange value tends towards the absolute. Profit determines the fate of the planet in a scornful ignorance of man and nature. A frenzied intellectualization reduces the gap between manual and intellectual labor. What wins out there isn’t the intelligence of Life, but the indifference of beings and gestures, daily bent to the reflexes of work programmed to procreate nothingness: this is the deal that’s been clinched, not with what’s alive but with a society where everything that moves is mechanical and quantifiable in their stock quotes. Such is the commodity perspective. Though the hierarchical pyramid has been compressed and power has collapsed, the sentiments of a universe where beings freeze into objects continue to push passively towards death all those who do not perceive just how much a new violence is smoldering beneath the rotting of the traditional struggles, to what extent the antagonism between exploiter and exploited has exhausted itself since today it’s been revealed that there’s a common denominator between the two factions — the lucrative exploitation of life itself.

Organization

The unchaining of the will to live will be to insurrectional fury what childhood exuberance is to the foot-stamping of old men.

Power has never had at its disposal so many means of imposing its sovereignty, and never has it had so little force left to apply those means with.

The politics of the gods was impenetrable. A great ideological fervor brushed aside doubts and scruples. It was necessary that the demands of the market condemn that last residue of agrarian structures, bureaucratic tyranny, with the unquestionable accusation of “insufficient marketability”, in order that nothing hide any longer the disconnectable circuits of the computerized economy.

Assuredly, soviet bureaucratization had already made palpable the absurdity of plans that work as well on paper as they are perfectly useless in reality. The sinking of the bureaucratic glacier managed to demonstrate concretely exactly what hierarchical power always had been — an attempt to organize the living by emptying them of their substance for the economy’s profit. The distance that separated the heavenly spirit from earthly matter is today only the distance between the fist that closes on the necessity of working and the hand that opens to the pleasures of loving and creating.

Managing the Collapse

What is the effective, if not efficient, existence of the last forms of power reduced to today? To the science of management. It alone has a direct grip on the economy now that the economy has had the political vermin plucked off it, its kings, pontiffs, heads of State and factions — now that it spreads across the earth the visible circuits of the great computer.

What’s the most prized quality among political men now that they’ve become little more than bellboys for the businessmen? What’s their biggest electoral selling point? Charisma? Stubbornness? The iron fist? Seduction? Intelligence? Not at all! It’s only important that they have a good management sense.

What a fine logic: The times demand good managers with an attentiveness that must be all the greater now that there’s nothing left to manage but bankruptcies.

Thirty years ago, revolutionaries, demanding the skin of the bureaucrats, called for the formation of new organizations that would liquidate the trouble-making chaos-mongers and create the triumph of a self-managed order. They took the skin of the bureaucrats but only managed to dress themselves in it.

The walls of the bureaucratic citadels and of the Eastern empires have fallen, not beneath the assault of revolutionary freedom, but beneath the pressure of the commodity, demanding its free passage with such transparency that all that was required was that it give the word, for the iron curtain to fall.

The old revolutionaries of 1968 — of whom few were aware of the refusal of survival being expressed at that time — got promotions in the dashing army of the new managers. Since the debacle of economic collapse is doing just fine on its own, they had every leisure to act in the best interests of the people by acting in the interest of the economy. They put order in defeat and dignity in the rout. Young wolves have always, at the right time of the season, made real fine mutton.

A Return to the Concrete

For the first time in history, the feeling that the economy has usurped the sovereignty of Life has given to the will to live the consciousness of a new sovereignty it could and must create.

The movement of becoming of commodities has been the force of things weighing on destinies everywhere. Its universality has, in the bodies of human individuals, however unique they all are, been materialized as an ensemble of functions and roles that agitate people, people made to act according to the mind, culture, ideology that they’ve chosen, like so many dancing puppets, hardly different from one another. The return to the concrete denounces the imposture of abstract man, of man torn from himself in the name of humanity itself.

The separation between what is lived and the social market, which claims to govern it, is so present today that it makes people’s commitments towhatever career or path they go down very fragile, beginning with what they call “social responsibility”. Why would I ratify any contract with a society so contrary to life that simply surviving on this planet is getting harder and harder to do? All willing obedience to a world that is destroying itself is an act of self-destruction.

The rubble and ruins they accumulate on the one hand and refurbish on the other don’t concern me at all, except for insofar as they impose detours on me. It isn’t easy to live and less still to keep one’s desire to live; that’s a constant effort that excuses me from the other efforts.

The Dilapidated State of the Mechanical, Pushed Onto the Living

There’s nothing left to oppose the growing force of Life besides the force of inertia that keeps bringing to their knees those who power cannot constrain any longer.

Power has lost the sublime and terrifying radiation which once made it at once so frighteningly close and yet so far away: close with its permanent inquisitions, its police criss-crossing towns and minds; and far away because of the inaccessible renewal that never holds back the knife that slits the throats of tyrants.

Since public opinion seems to be registering the failure and collapse of the many forms of authority, the mixture of fear, hate, respect and disregard that were once propagated by the long robes, the magic trinkets, and the uniforms is at last being exorcized amid laughs and heckling before soon becoming dissolved in an amused indifference.

One needs neither to know anything, nor to love, nor to be loved, in order to feel the need to govern others. The more prestige you gain, the less capable you become emotionally. And what submission there is to the mechanisms of roles and functions in that! The obsession with reigning, imposing, vanquishing, subjugating, makes the body nothing more than an ensemble of control-levers. Gestures, muscles, gazes, thoughts, all seem to move like pendulums. One must attach to oneself,]\ by means of favors, flattery, compromises, and alliances those who cannot be excluded: and destroy, with morbid insistence, insolence, and peremptory reasons anyone and everyone who does not let themselves be bought by constraint, contract, and seduction. It’s a happy existence for those who draw their pleasure and the best parts of their lives from the constant refining of their authentic selves.

The more the mechanical takes hold of life and the living, the more frustration will binge and purge with aggressive compensations. In the days when patriarchal power and the uncontested wave of authoritarian behaviors lent a powerful means to functions and roles, the rage to dominate which today only brings up neuroses and ridicule was called charisma, responsibility, or a sense of duty. There’s too little (social) fabric left for those who ‘are cut out to be bosses’ to decently drape with it their functional powerlessness and their incapacity to live.

A typical stupidity of supposedly subversive terrorism is not having understood that the people that having power produces are diminished physically and mentally to such a point that they take a powerful reassurance that people are still interested in them from the interest that is devoted to them by a campaign of assassination or denigration. Sign of the times: the name of Caserio has eclipsed that of the president that he sent to meet his maker (he sent him “ad patres”), and the hardly glorious Aldo Moro is remembered better than his lifeless assassin. The sleeping dogs, the dogs that bite, the barking dogs of order — they’re all from the same kennel. Those who still kill each other only to die get the cemeteries they deserve.

Whoever has decided to live according to his or her desires becomes unreachable. He hasn’t any roles, function, renown, riches, poverty, character, nor state by means of which they could get a grip on him and put him in the trap. And if he must, like everyone else, pay tribute to work and money, he doesn’t truly commit himself to it, being engaged elsewhere, where he has better things to do.

Nothing is more depressing for the falsely brave than suddenly realizing that he has no adversary, that he is struggling alone in the boxing ring of competition and polemic, and that it is up to him and only him to give himself reverence or contempt.

The mirror is broken, wherein the men of power once tried to deliver an admirable image to the public. If he happens to furtively contemplate it, he’ll only ever see the appalling inanity of so many efforts, the frightening emptiness of a life sacrificed to appearances.

To never try to ascend to the heights where puffed-up power tosses off its last orders, is to let those who tried to degrade and crush you face to face only with their worst enemy — themselves.

The art of being yourself doesn’t impede on other people’s space, it occupies a different plane of existence where there’s no lack of space — it lets the heroes of authoritarian behavior have a choice as to how they’re going to disappear: they can finish destroying themselves as living beings, or they can destroy all roles and functions and begin to truly live.

Finishing off Triumphalism and Competitiveness

To take the time to feel yourself to be alive, from moment to moment, is to find yourself freed of rights and of duty, connected so intimately with obeying and commanding. To learn to seize each daily pleasure, minimal as it may be, creates little by little a milieu that one belongs to unreservedly, where one can be true without reticence, where the exercise of desires impassions you to such a point that there’s nothing and no one that could interfere unpleasantly without very quickly losing weight, importance, and meaning.

A feeling of fullness is not a state in fact, but rather a becoming, not something to contemplate but to create. The game of desire and enjoyment implies a perspective which doesn’t include the criteria of the commodity world and its imperative reasons. There is an intangible border which a sensual knowledge reveals with certain signs. All I want, for instance, is that innocence of happy childhood which illuminates the faces of lovers in the moment of love, even though the fits of authority they give in to mark their stamp on the children’s painful tensing-up, frustrated in their need for tenderness, which avenges itself with the whinings of tyrannical caprice.

To be happy is also to not worry about being more or less happy than anyone else, nor about furnishing proofs or avowals of one’s happiness. Happiness starts to be bothered away from the moment it needs to make itself worth something. Take away its motive, pusillanimous and frightful, which is the precept “to be happy, let us live in hiding”, and you will find a deeper meaning to it: enjoyment doesn’t exhibit itself except at its own expense, and good fortune turns into its opposite as soon as smugness takes hold of it. Vanity is an authenticity that empties itself out with a sinking sound. The living never immerse themselves in glory — only the dead remains of the living do. The pleasure that doesn’t offer itself freely is only a commodity in the supermarket.

To love yourself isn’t to admire yourself; I only have to balance out compared values, mechanisms of competition where the commerce of men is ruled by the commerce of things.

How can we take pleasure in being ourselves if we must at each instant climb podiums and “hang tough” in order to not be rushed?

The ridiculousness given to the spirit of competition by the normal subsidence of markets only makes the leitmotif of traditional education more absurd and odious: “Let the best man win!” The child has no need for victories, neither over himself or over others; they are already only so many defeats that deal a violent blow to his capacity to love and be loved, and install in the child the fear of orgasm, since in the eyes of a society where everything must be weighed, bought, sold, lent, returned, paid for, orgastic enjoyment is, because of its natural freeness, only a weakness and an error. As a female leader once said: “One must avoid making love when one is in business; one loses one’s combativeness that way.”