<nettime> economy or life

[sebastian@rolux.org]

ECONOMY OR LIFE

https://lundi.am/IMG/arton2929-resp1440.jpg

"- Can't you see, can't you all see, you speakers, that it is we who are dying, 
and that here below the only thing that really lives, is the Machine? We 
created the Machine, to fulfill our will, but we can no longer bend it to our 
will. She stole our sense of space and our sense of touch, she blurred all 
human relationships and reduced love to a carnal act, she paralyzed our bodies 
and our wills, and now she forces us to venerate her." - EM Forster, The 
Machine Stops (1909)

Not everything is pretended in the official communication. In the midst of so 
many disconcerting lies, it happens that the present rulers have visibly tight 
hearts, and it is when they detail how much the economy is suffering. The old 
people who are left to suffocate at home so that they do not enter into 
ministerial statistics or that they come to clutter the hospital, certainly, 
certainly. But let a good company die, and their throats are tied. They run to 
his bedside. Admittedly, we die everywhere of respiratory distress, but the 
economy should not be short of oxygen. For her, he will never lack artificial 
respirators. Central banks provide it. The rulers are like this old bourgeois 
who, while a visitor is dying in his living room, has cold sweats for stains on 
his floor. Or like this expert of the national technocracy who, in a recent 
report on atomic safety, simply concluded: "the main victim of the major 
nuclear accident is the French economy."

Faced with the microbial storm present, a thousand times announced at all 
levels of government since the late 1990s, we get lost in conjectures about the 
lack of preparedness of leaders. How is it that masks, charlottes, beds, 
caregivers, tests, remedies are so lacking? Why are these measures so late, and 
these reversals of doctrine so sudden? Why these so contradictory injunctions - 
to confine oneself but go to work, to close the markets but not the 
supermarkets, to stop the circulation of the virus but not that of the goods 
which transport it? Why so grotesquely obstruct the administration of massive 
tests or a manifestly effective and inexpensive drug? Why the choice of general 
confinement rather than the detection of sick subjects? The answer is simple 
and consistent: it's the economy, stupid!

Rarely will the economy appear to this point for what it is: a religion, if not 
a sect. A religion is after all only a sect which has taken power. Rarely have 
the rulers appeared so clearly possessed. Their lunar calls to sacrifice, to 
war and to total mobilization against the invisible enemy, to the union of the 
faithful, their incontinent verbal delusions which no longer embarrass any 
paradox, are those of any evangelical celebration; and here we are summoned to 
endure them each behind our screen, in increasing disbelief. The characteristic 
of this kind of faith is that no fact is able to invalidate it, on the 
contrary. Far from the spread of the virus condemning the global reign of the 
economy, it is rather an opportunity to realize its presuppositions. The new 
ethos of confinement where "men do not take pleasure (but on the contrary a 
great displeasure) in life in company", where everyone considers anyone, since 
his strict separation, as a threat to his life, where fear of death imposes 
itself as the foundation of the social contract, realizes the anthropological 
and existential hypothesis of the Leviathan of Hobbes - Hobbes that Marx deemed 
"one of the oldest economists in England, one of the most original philosophers 
" To situate this hypothesis, it is good to recall that Hobbes was amused that 
his mother gave birth to him under the effect of the terror caused by 
lightning. Born of fear, he saw logically in life only fear of death. "This is 
his problem," one is tempted to say. No one is obliged to conceive of this sick 
view as the foundation of its existence, and even less of all existence. Now 
the economy, whether liberal or Marxist, right or left, directed or 
deregulated, is this disease which offers itself as a general health formula. 
It is indeed, in this, a religion.

As friend Hocart noted, nothing fundamentally distinguishes the president of a 
"modern" nation from a tribal chief from the Pacific Islands or a sovereign 
pontiff in Rome. It is always a question of making all the propitiatory rites 
capable of attracting prosperity to the community, of reconciling the gods, of 
sparing their wrath, of ensuring unity and of preventing people from disperse. 
"Its raison d'être is not to coordinate but to preside over the ritual" (Kings 
and courtiers): it is not to understand what makes all the incurable 
imbecility of contemporary leaders. One thing is to attract prosperity, another 
to manage the economy. One thing is to do rituals, another to rule people's 
lives. How power is of a purely liturgical nature, this is what sufficiently 
proves the profound uselessness, even the essentially counterproductive 
activity, of the current rulers, who only manage to see the situation as an 
incredible opportunity to extend their prerogatives disproportionately, and to 
make sure that nobody comes to take their miserable seat from them. To see the 
calamities that befall us, it is really necessary that the leaders of the 
economic religion are the last of the nullards in matters of propitiatory 
rites, and that this religion is in fact only an infernal damnation.

So here we are at a crossroads: either we save the economy, or we save 
ourselves; either we get out of the economy, or we let ourselves be enlisted in 
the "great shadow army” of those sacrificed in advance - the very 1914-18 
rhetoric of the moment leaves absolutely no doubt on this point. It's the 
economy or life. And since we are facing a religion, it is indeed a schism. 
States of emergency everywhere decreed, the infinite extension of police and 
population control measures already at work, the abolition of all limits to 
exploitation, the sovereign decision of who we make live and which we let die, 
the uninhibited apology of Chinese governmentality, do not aim at providing now 
for the "salvation of the populations", but to prepare the ground for a bloody 
"return to normal", or rather to the establishment of a normality even more 
anomalous than that which prevailed in the world before. In this sense, leaders 
do not lie, for once: the future is playing out now. It is now that the 
caregivers have to challenge all obedience to those who flatter them by 
sacrificing them. It is now that we must wrest from the industries of disease 
and specialists in "public health" the definition of our health, our great 
health. It is now that we must set up the networks of mutual aid, supplies and 
self-production which will allow us not to succumb to blackmail with dependence 
by which we will seek to redouble our enslavement. It is now, since the 
prodigious suspension that we are experiencing, that we have to imagine 
everything we need to prevent the return and everything we will need to live 
beyond the economy. Now is the time to nurture the complicity capable of 
limiting the impudent revenge of a police force that knows it is hated. It is 
now that we must deconfine ourselves, not by simple bravado, but step by 
step, with all the intelligence and attention that befits friendship. Now is 
the time to elucidate the life we ​​want - what this life requires to build and 
destroy, with whom we want to live and with whom we no longer want to live. No 
care for leaders who arm themselves for war against us. No "living together" 
with those who let us die. We will have had no protection for the price of our 
bid; the social contract is dead; it's up to us to invent something else. The 
current rulers know very well that, on the day of the deconfinement, we will 
have no other desire than to see their heads fall, and that is why they will do 
everything so that such a day does not take place, to diffract, control, 
differentiate the exit from containment. It is up to us to decide when and 
under what conditions. It is up to us to shape the aftermath. It is up to us to 
draw the technically and humanly practicable paths out of the economy. "We get 
up and break up," said a Goncourt deserter not so long ago. Or to quote an 
economist who sought to detox from his religion: "Greed is a vice; it is a 
mischief to extort usurious profits; love of money is abhorrent; they walk more 
surely on the paths of virtue and wisdom, those who care less about tomorrow. 
Once again we will come back to estimate the ends more than the means, and to 
prefer the good to the useful. We will honor those who can teach us to pick the 
present moment in a virtuous and good way, the exquisite people who know how to 
enjoy things in the immediate future, the lilies of the fields which neither 
weave nor spin." (Keynes)

https://lundi.am/L-economie-ou-la-vie

translation: google



--==============�70755105118810483=Content-Type: message/rfc822
MIME-Version: 1.0

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: confirm 0668db99103dfabca4d4d3ee041e1e4000dfc982
Sender: nettime-l-request@mail.kein.org
From: nettime-l-request@mail.kein.org
Date: Tue, 31 Mar 2020 13:06:58 +0200
Message-ID: <mailman.2064.1585652818.54339.nettime-l@mail.kein.org>

If you reply to this message, keeping the Subject: header intact,
Mailman will discard the held message.  Do this if the message is
spam.  If you reply to this message and include an Approved: header
with the list password in it, the message will be approved for posting
to the list.  The Approved: header can also appear in the first line
of the body of the reply.
--==============�70755105118810483==--

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: