Ray of Hope

I went to one last Holiday party last night and after an acquaintance asked about my year I ended up with a great new Wobblie. Step by step, as the song goes.Turns out there are people out there yearning for an alternative to politics-as-usual, looking to connect.This was my Christmas present!

Che Bob pointed me to an interesting manifesto of sorts by a group known as the Tarnac 9. In the style of Guy Debord it lays out a cultural/political critique full of irony: "Here lies the present paradox: work has totally triumphed over other ways of existing at the very moment when workers have become superfluous." Here they refer to Western Europe which like the U.S. has exported work to cheaper realms but still worships it's moral curative power.

In the "7th circle" called "We are building a civilized space" there are many ideas similar to those kulturcritic presents in his book The Recovery of Ecstacy.They don't try to identify a "departure point" as such but it is a piercing critique of our most basic "civilizing" structures and myths.

There is an interesting unpacking of the new Green Economy/Great Turning sort of progressivism": "The petite bourgeois is quick to embrace the new fad of 'degrowth'" which "preserves the economic as morality". "Consume and produce less. Become joyously frugal.Eat Organic, ride your bike,stop smoking,and pay close attention to the products that you buy." "Don't use up our natural capital." "Avoid a social crisis that would threaten humanism and democracy." Simply put: become economical. This new 'bioeconomy' cannot be established without screening subjects and zones singled out for transformation. "The chaos that we hear about will either provide the opportunity for this screening or for our victory over this odious project."

It would be easy to argue that Copenhagen demonstrated precisely this "screening" process, which is nothing new I suppose, but compliments the "dispossession" David Harvey talks about. Some of what they write appears contradictory, such as this warning to "don't become an organization or milieu" followed a paragraph later by the injunction to "organize...and spread this necessary disposition towards fraud." I find this poorly defined boundary fairly often with "autonomistas". The forms of resistance that are advocated in the text such as fraud and theft against "the system" is different than Freeganism. The workers will simply be taxed more to pay for their leisure.Also, the Tarnac 9 advocacy for "self-dependence" sounds a great deal like what I heard at Celebrating Conservatism, survival kits and skill sets from the frontier days.

My real question is, what did the "fires of 2005" really accomplish? This growing unrest can be linked to movements in Greece and perhaps Mexico,anywhere else? What autonomous movements exist in Europe? Are they growing? Where would one look?