:: [Bricolabs] [Fwd] A call to the Arm…
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Auteur: Jaromil
Date:  
À: Bricolabs startup mailinglist
Sujet: [Bricolabs] [Fwd] A call to the Army of Love and to the Army of Software

re all.

i don't know where you are tomorrow.

but please join the body of humanity on the street and send out a big
wave, you can do it, we can change it. break out of individual. we are
undivided as one, indivisible as many, subjects of our own collective
LOVE

in the worst case tomorrow, don't be alone. please stay
together. light a candle, mourn a prayer or curse some gods as you
like. think about social justice, think about the IMF people and the
humanity they want to take away from us, think about peace and what's
the way to it.

the World is screaming for it.

we are many and we had never a choice to opt in or opt out.

we were just put in this failing system.

now its our moment to ask for the right to re-write it.


----- Forwarded message from franco berardi -----

Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2011 22:45:25 +0200
From: franco berardi <franberardi@???>
To: jaromil <jaromil@???>
Subject: A call to the Army of Love and to the Army of Software

Geert lovink & franco berardi


[1]kafca.eu

______________________________


October 2011. The fight opposing financial dictatorship is erupting.


The so-called ‘financial markets’ and their cynical services are
destroying the very foundations of social civilization. The legacy of
the postwar compromise between the working class and progressive
bourgeoisie has all but disappeared. Neoliberal policies are cutting
back education and the public health system and is cancelling the right
to a salary and a pension. The outcome will be impoverishment of large
parts the population, a growing precarity of labor conditions
(freelance, short-term contracts, periods of unemployment) and daily
humiliation of workers. The yet to be seen effect of the financial
crisis will be violence, as people conjure up scapegoats in order to
vent their rage. Ethnic cleansing, civil war, obliteration of
democracy. This is a system we call financial Nazism: FINAZISM.


Right now people are fighting back in many places, and in many ways.
Occupy Wall Street inspired a mass mobilization in New York that is
extending across the USA every day. In Greece workers and students are
squatting Syntagma square and protesting against the blackmail by the
European Central Bank, which is devastating the country. Cairo, Madrid,
Tel Aviv, the list of the ‘movements of the squares’ is proliferating.
On October 15 cities across the globe will amass with people protesting
against the systemic robbery.


Will our demonstrations and occupations stop the Finazist machine? They
will not. Resistance will not resist, and our fight will not stop the
legal crimes. Let’s be frank, we will not persuade our enemies to end
their predatory attacks (‘let’s make even more profit from the next
downfall’) for the simple reason that our enemies are not human beings.
They are machines. Yes, human beings – corporate managers, stock
owners, traders – are cashing the money that we are losing, and prey
upon resources that workers produce. Politicians sign laws that deliver
the lives of millions of people to the Almighty God of the Market.


Bankers and investors are not the real decision makers, they are
participants in an economy of gestural confusion. The real process of
predatory power has become automated. The transfer of resources and
wealth from those who produce to those who do nothing except oversee
the abstract patterns of financial transactions is embedded in the
machine, in the software that governs the machine. Forget about
governments and party politics. Those puppets who pretend to be leaders
are talking nonsense. The paternalistic options they offer around
‘austerity measures’ underscore a rampant cynicism internal to party
politics: they all know they lost the power to model finance capitalism
years ago. Needless to say, the political class are anxious to perform
the act of control and sacrifice social resources of the future in the
form of budget cuts in order to ‘satisfy the markets’. Stop listening
to them, stop voting for them, stop hoping and cursing them. They are
just pimps, and politics is dead.


What should we do? Living with the Finazist violence, bending to the
arrogance of algorithms, accepting growing exploitation and declining
salaries? Nope. Let’s fight against Finazism because it is never too
late. At the moment Finazism is winning for two reasons. First, because
we have lost the pleasure of being together. Thirty years of
precariousness and competition have destroyed social solidarity. Media
virtualization has destroyed the empathy among bodies, the pleasure of
touching each other, and the pleasure of living in urban spaces. We
have lost the pleasure of love, because too much time is devoted to
work and virtual exchange. The large army of lovers have to wake up.
Second, because our intelligence has been submitted to algorithmic
power in exchange for a handful of shitty money and a virtual life. For
a salary that is miserable when compared to the profits of the
corporate bosses, a small army of ‘softwarists’ are accepting the task
of destroying human dignity and justice. The small army of software
programmers have to wake up.


There is only a way to awake the lover that is hidden in our paralyzed,
frightened and frail virtualized bodies. There is only a way to awake
the human being that is hidden in the miserable daily life of the
softwarist: take to the streets and fight. Burning banks is useless, as
real power is not in the physical buildings, but in the abstract
connection between numbers, algorithms and information. But occupying
banks is good as a starting point for the long-lasting process of
dismantling and rewriting the techno-linguistic automatons enslaving
all of us. This is the only politics that counts. Some say that the
Occupy Wall Street movement lacks clear demands and an agenda. This
remark is ridiculous. As in the case of all social movements the
political backgrounds and motives are diverse, even diffuse and quite
frequently contradictory. The occupation movement would not be better
off with more realistic demands.


What is thrilling right now is the multiplicity of new connections and
commitment. But what is even more exciting is finding ways that can set
in motion the collective ‘exodus’ from the capitalist agony. Let’s not
talk about the ‘sustainability’ of the movement. That’s boring.
Everything is transient. These fast-burning events do not help us to
overcome the daily depression. Occupying the squares and other public
spaces is a way to respond to the short duration of the demonstrations
and marches. We are here to stay.


We are not demanding a reform of the global financial system or the
ECB. The return to national currencies of the past, as requested by the
rightwing populists, will not make ordinary citizens less vulnerable to
currency speculation. A return to state sovereignty is not the solution
either, and many people already sense this. The demand for more
‘intervention’, control and oversight of markets is a hopeless gesture.
The real issue is that humans are no longer in charge. We need to
dismantle the machines themselves. This can be done in a very peaceful
manner. Hack into their system, publish their crimes through
Wikileaks-type initiatives and then delete their real-time trading
killing networks for good.


Financial markets are all about the politics of speed and
deterritorialization. But we know their architectures and
vulnerabilities. The financial world has lost its legitimacy. There is
no global consensus anymore that the ‘market’ is always right. And this
is our chance to act. The movement has to respond at this level.
Decommissioning and re-programming financial software is not the dream
of a Luddite sabotaging the machine. ‘Market regulation’ will not do
the job, only autonomy and the self-organization of software workers
can dismantle the predatory algorithms and create self-empowering
software for society.


The general intellect and the erotic social body have to meet on the
streets and squares, and united they will break the Finazist chains.

References

1. http://kafca.eu/

----- End forwarded message -----