introduction…

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…introduction…

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Dialectical Delinquents

Taking up the violence of the delinquents on the plane of ideas”

Incorporating:

Rudolf Rockers, Hegel’s AngelsDebord’s Deadbeats,

 Vaneigem’s Vandals, the Bakunin and Marx Brothers and Sisters,

Skins for SkepticismMods against Post-modernism,

Punks for Proletarian Praxis, Rühle’s Ruthlessly Critical Rude Boys,  

Hippy Hooligans Against Hierarchical Hegemony, Grunge Greasers From Gründrisse,

Teds against tedium& Crips for Creative Critique

situation grave 2

One of the aims of the ruling show is to get people to believe that they have a better chance of living if they remain on their knees. But realistically, the choice today is increasingly no longer a question of it being better to die on our feet or to live on our knees, but a choice between dying on our knees or living and dying on our feet. Fairly good chance that we’ll be fucked if we get off our knees, but for sure, we’ll be even more fucked if we don’t. 

“…that paradoxical feeling …..

of living in a world

without any possible escape,

in which there was nothing for it

but

to fight

for an impossible escape…”
Victor Serge

Never before has a global revolutionary destruction of hierarchical power seemed so indisputably necessary. And yet never before has it seemed so impossible. The monster created and developed by the various ruling classes and those willingly submissive to them – the commodity society – has never before been so obviously intent on the destruction of everything other than itself. If an increasingly intelligent global community of revolt doesn’t seriously threaten the power of the state and the economy over the next 2, 5, 10, 15 years then future rulers will be ruling over social relations that will make the decadence of Caligula-dominated Rome seem like a beacon of enlightenment and World War ll like an oasis of compassion.

those who lead the world graffiti

“Will alone does not suffice to provide oneself with courage and remove fear; truly one must toil to consider the reasons, the aims and the examples which are able to convince one that danger is not overwhelming, that there will always be more safety in defence than in escape; that one will gather glory and joy as a winner, whereas in escaping one can only expect regret and shame” 

– Descartes

*************************************

As we advance further into an epoch of what  will almost certainly be permanent and worsening crisis, this site hopes to help clarify and extend the revolts that are developing everywhere and help defeat the counter-revolution that is developing everywhere. Theory informs practise and practise informs theory. Neither can make progress without the other. In opposition to all the various forms of determinism vis-a-vis the eventual outcome  of a possible future revolution (whether optimistic or pessimistic), a significant part of  the struggle is to see what choices are made and what choices are avoided. Practical ideas improve or regress on the basis of the efforts to supersede the past, its strengths and weaknesses, its successes and failures – for ourselves and the whole world: inseparably.

***

This is not an open access site: it has no pretensions to being “democratic” in the sense of being welcoming to absolutely anybody. Anyone who persists over time in dogmatic ideological arguments which go nowhere will be censored and/or banned. Undoubtedly there will be many who have ideologically petrified notions whilst also having some lucid ideas and interesting facts to contribute. But if they persist in pursuing their dogmas impervious to argument, then their useless &  facile comments will be suppressed. The aim of this site is not to get into head-bashing ego-battles, to repeatedly refute the same stale ideas, but to develop perspectives that clarify and help advance social contestation, to bring a breath of fresh air. All texts appearing here will be signed by their author(s) or their pseudonyms.

Please note: any comments sent here may take time to appear on the site

***

Unless otherwise stated, all texts have been written exclusively by me (SamFantoSamotnaf)

books 9

“My request that my writing be read twice has aroused great indignation. Unjustly so. After all, I do not ask that they be read once.” – Karl Kraus

The texts on this site will eventually include all public texts written or co-written by me since I first started writing public texts in 1969 – the Good, the Bad and the Embarassing. Making these archive texts public on the internet is not intended to in any way valorise their importance for present expressions of opposition; it should be obvious that even the good archive texts have to be critiqued and updated, and made relevant to what’s going on now.

Other texts will include links to already online texts that I think are useful, or interesting texts that do not so far exist online. It will also include news items or links to news items in the “news of opposition” section. The texts are organised under various overlapping and oversimplified categories and many might appear several times, though in different sections. There is obviously no copyright on these texts.

“I and my public understand each other very well: it does not hear what I say, and I don’t say what it wants to hear”

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SS284TL

to contact this site directly without sending a post for a specific page, write to:

SamFanto@riseup.net

 

 THIS SITE WAS ORIGINALLY LAUNCHED AT THE END OF DECEMBER 2012

(updated 20th February 2013: my thanks to Bartleby who, despite preferring not to, provided me with invaluable help in re-organising this site)

Brought to you by “Sam Samotnaf Fantomas” 

Fantomas_early_film_poster“…it is necessary to take into account the bitterness of certain servants of power who are imprisoned in roles that are stultifying and humiliating. However, indulgence has its limits. If, despite everything, these people persist in putting a guilty conscience and their bitterness in the service of power by creating the conditioning mechanisms that colonise their own lives, and if they choose power because power has already chosen them then….too bad.”

PS If you want a 6-point programme here, see “Where we stand”.

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Hits as of 21/05/19: 358891

Comments

16 responses to “introduction…”

  1. Isocratus avatar

    What’s this I feel on my whole being. I’m becoming a smile. Thanx!

  2. Chastity Henley avatar
    Chastity Henley

    Wonderful site. Lots of helpful info here. I’m sending it to a few friends ans also sharing in delicious. And of course, thanks to your effort!

  3. gilles avatar

    C’est embêtant parce que je ne comprends pas la langue anglaise . Mais heureusement il reste les images 😉

  4. Lee James Blunt avatar

    Great site thank you

  5. Jimmy Spats avatar

    “Never before has a global revolutionary destruction of hierarchical power seemed so indisputably necessary. And yet never before has it seemed so impossible…”

    Ken Booth, The Impossible Dream:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcxoWvNbtS0

    1. Sam FantoSamotnaf avatar

      This song originally came from “Man of La Mancha”, a musical about Don Quixote – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfHnzYEHAow
      Much as I quite like the song, unfortunately, merely dreaming of change, of fighting the unbeatable foe etc., is one of the constant fantasies that churn round loads of people’s heads without it meaning anything in practice. And Don Quixote is hardly an example of genuine opposition. Whilst I might be taking you too seriously, this abstract wishful thinking seems to be one of your dominant character traits.

      1. Jim Katz avatar
        Jim Katz

        “…our motto must be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but by analysing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself, whether it manifests itself in a religious or a political form. It will then become evident that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality.”

        Letter to Ruge, 1843

  6. Isocratus Infinitus avatar

    My smile hurts. Every cell of Goebbels, Stalin, Lenin, and Mao reincarnated into a thousand ass-clowns each, and their emergence from foul-smelling little electric cars made of recycled body parts, seem to be centered in New York, San Francisco, and other ilky cesspools.

    Moaning and droning, as if their :lives” depended upon those “joys”, the unwashed, the deplorable, and the lessors apparently all who crowd the backgrounfd of their mirror-based worldviews.

    In zero-sum “logic”, mindlessness. witlessness, crotchlessness. and heartlessness map across the infinite quadrants with a flatttening centerpoint of (x,y)=(0,0) assuring inversions and inductions always end up circling that narcissist-inhibited and inhabited “point”.

    They smell of Rousseau scathe, Robspierre’s rage, DeSade’s abuse, Marx’s sociopathy, and Debord’s narcissism.

    Idolic totems made from mass murder, dialectically-contrived ravages, and obfuscated subterfuge, their mainstay “glue” for any sort of vertical “presence” is always other people’s “blood, sweat, & tears”.

    Those requiring and correcting smiles… exude sadism, more os whence massochism is not returned.
    No thanks.
    Collectivism by any name, especially when “decreed” by sock-puppets and foul-breathed lip-biters, is slavery.

  7. Sam FantoSamotnaf avatar

    From T:

    The Production of the Dominant Dialogy

    https://illwill.com/the-production-of-the-dominant-dialogy

    This was published by Ill Will last March, and it’s a part of a larger book that came out this year. This part speaks about the new corporate strategy, since the mid-1970’s of “dialog” in order to influence and then dismantle or co-opt movements and activists that take aim at your business – a different strategy than the classic misinformation and smear campaigns etc. He gives for example the successful international boycott of Nestlé due to their shady activities in manipulating African women to use their breast-milk substitutes instead of real breast milk, and how the business world learned from this experience and developed a new strategy which meticulously studied the nature of the different types of activists in a certain movement and how to speak their language.

    “In 1974, British activists published a booklet called The Baby Killer. They denounced the health effects of the breast milk substitute marketed by Nestlé in Third World countries. Sold to populations that could often not read the instructions for use and that lacked access to drinking water, powdered milk was all too often toxic for infants. Ignoring the alerts issued by nutritionists, Nestlé conducted marketing campaigns that involved, for example, getting female representatives of the company to distribute samples; dressed in nurses’ suits, they deterred African mothers from breastfeeding.

    This militant text might have remained confidential if the company’s managers had not made the mistake of overreacting. In 1974, this behemoth of agribusiness sued a Swiss group that had translated the brochure into German, thus giving a global resonance to the accusations in it. In July 1977, American activists called for a boycott of Nestlé. Four years later, more than seven hundred organizations had joined their cause worldwide.

    With its back against the wall, the firm decided to change approach. It recruited a special advisor who had already started to make a reputation for his expertise in crisis management: Rafael Pagan, a man of the hard right and a former military intelligence officer. He had been an advisor on these issues to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and in the late 1970s became a business advisor. He joined Nestlé in January 1981 to set up a task force to fight the activists for every inch of the ground.

    Members of this team, composed in part of former military men, would later be found sitting on the board of Pagan International in the mid-1980s, then at Mongoven, Duchin & Biscoe, and finally, in the 2000s, at ‘Stratfor’. If the name of this outfit rings a bell, this may be because the hacker Jeremy Hammond exposed it in 2011, posting thousands of electronic messages that he had hacked from its servers on WikiLeaks. In the meantime, for three decades, these experts in counter-activism had been selling their services at a high price to multinationals that were about as commendable as Shell in the face of the anti-apartheid boycott, or Union Carbide, or Monsanto.

    Throughout the many campaigns they conducted, Pagan and his colleagues developed a typology of activists. This simplistic scheme allowed them, at each new confrontation, to place their opponents in small stereotypical psycho-tactical boxes. Another member of the gang, Ronald Duchin, set out this house typology one day at a congress of the American Association of cattle farmers, and his intervention was then printed in the organization’s bulletin: ‘I am also a cattleman’, he began as a captatio benevolentiae. ‘My wife and I run a good-sized Limousin and Charolais cow and calf operation in the Kentucky Bluegrass … one way or another we all are activists. However, the activists we are concerned about here are the ones who want to change the way your industry does business’. Take the case of the BST growth hormone (bovine somatotropin) produced by Monsanto: ‘Most of you know it very well. So do I because we work for Monsanto on the issue … BST is a synthetic hormone produced by biotechnology. It has been shown to increase milk production in dairy cows by 10 to 25 percent. Yet it is under attack by a plethora of public interest groups’.

    But who are these groups? If you want to defeat them, you need to know them. But this is not complicated: they fall, invariably, into four main categories:

    The radicals. These want to change the system, they have underlying socio-economic/political motives, are hostile to enterprise as such, and may be extremist or violent. With them, there is nothing to be done.

    The opportunists. These offer visibility, power, followers and, perhaps, even employment. The key to dealing with opportunists is to provide them with at least the perception of a partial victory.

    The idealists. These people are usually naive and altruistic. They apply an ethical and moral standard. The problem with them is that they are sincere, and, as a result, very credible. Except they are also very credulous. If it can be shown that their opposition to an industry or its products causes harm to others and cannot be ethically justified, they are forced to change their position.

    The realists. These are a godsend. They can live with trade-offs; they are willing to work within the system and want to work within the system. They are not interested in radical change, but are pragmatic.

    Faced with protest, the way forward is always the same: to negotiate with the realists, knowing that in most issues, it is the solution agreed upon by the realists which is accepted, especially when business participates in the decision-making process. Also, the idealists need to be re-educated into realists – an educational process, according to Duchin, which requires great sensitivity and understanding from the educator. If you can manage to work with the realists and re-educate the idealists, they will switch over to your position. Once these critics of conscience have been turned, the radicals will lose the broad credibility that the support of these moral authorities had conferred on them. Without support from the realists and the idealists the positions of radicals and opportunists are seen to be shallow and self-serving. At this point you will always be able to count on the opportunists to accept the final compromise. The premise is that the ‘radicals’ derive their strength only by drawing closer to more moderate blocks. Without this link, they are negligible. Radicals isolated in their niche of radicalism are harmless, and pose no threat: a bit of minority folklore without any impact. Such, then, is the general strategy: to cooperate with the realists, to converse with the idealists so as to convert them into realists, to isolate the radicals and to gobble up the opportunists.”

    The latest short piece from Hard Crackers is also relevant and not bad:
    https://hardcrackers.com/a-few-bad-apples

    “The average American used to believe that most cops were just doing their job, while the media focused on a few bad apples who do not represent the vast majority of police officers. This view has now fallen out of fashion — and I think we need to bring it back. Surely there are cops who are racist, sexist, homophobic, violent, and corrupt. But these are not all cops. Some cops are intelligent and sophisticated. They study the humanities and attempt to understand the structural causes of social problems police encounter in the field. These cops attempt to build trust with the communities they police, and go to work every day fighting to improve the public perception of US police. They are the bad apples.”

  8. alan2102 avatar
    alan2102

    “If an increasingly intelligent global community of revolt doesn’t seriously threaten the power of the state and the economy over the next 2, 5, 10, 15 years then….”

    Were those words written in 2012?

    1. Sam FantoSamotnaf avatar

      Yes. Why? It’s not exactly come true. But the present and future is very bleak – isolation and madness are worse than in previous epochs though other aspects of these previous epochs have not been realised (yet!)…however, the sense of community was far greater in the past.

  9. peewee avatar
    peewee

    “…the sense of community…”

    Are you talking about your own sense of community or the sense of the community? One thing that Ronnie Laing taught us is that only our own experience is authentic; we cannot judge the experience of others.

    1. Sam FantoSamotnaf avatar

      Both mine and that of others who have said that they had a greater feeling of community. It’s obvious that the sense of solidarity, of which community is a part, has suffered enormously over the years.

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