Many of the most conscious individuals, and in a way the most lucid, now tend to despair about the future of humanity and the possibility of a favorable outcome for the establishment of a truly humane society. It must be acknowledged that the successive “developments” observed over the past 50 years and up to the present day are, on the surface, not at all encouraging, as if everything were irrevocably heading for the worse.
It should be noted, however, that this surface, this display of the world, is for the most part the very face of domination, in that it wants to show us but also hide from us what it wants to instill in our minds. As a pretense of an overview, what is thus instilled on a daily basis is an incitement to renunciation and historical fatalism.
The managers of chaos, of the globalized Megamachine, thus signal to us that it is completely futile to hope for anything else and that they are, after all, in the best position to keep things going for a while, to avoid the worst… Incidentally, they also let us know, through very telling and meaningful examples, that they are prepared to do anything to stay in place and that it would therefore be preferable for the discontented, who are nevertheless growing in number, to keep quiet despite everything.
The representatives of the Megamachine never consider their responsibility; in fact, this is one of their defining characteristics. This is why, using a completely commonplace method, they constantly externalize evil and blame onto a completely abstract humanity that is guilty of all kinds of misdeeds and must therefore be brought into line by any means necessary. This is why, throughout the world, state and hierarchical structures of all kinds are now refocusing on what has always been their main function and what unites them all: the repression of the aspirations for emancipation of all peoples.
This global movement we are witnessing is in itself very revealing of the fact that an era has come to an end.
The implicit admission highlighted by these increasingly repressive logics is that this world, with its ridiculous borders, its vertical powers, its ruthless class relations, its massive destruction of natural environments, its racism and rampant discrimination, has nothing left to offer but desolation.
All the promises it sought to deliver have collapsed one after another, leaving behind only fields of ruins where most people are reduced to trying to survive painfully, paying the price for everything with their own skin and in the greatest confusion about the causes of all these wasted existences, all these lost lives.
This world cannot be saved or reformed, and the only real solution is to clearly envisage its complete overthrow. To do this, we must put an end to the force of habit that makes us accept as legitimate a whole set of deceptions put in place by the Megamachine to maintain our passivity or our confusion. We must therefore break free from the truncated or downright false visions linked to nationalism, the fiction of representative democracy or liberating technology, religions, or commercial productivism as the only source of progress. All these deceptions have amply demonstrated their futility and the disastrous reality of their outcomes. We must consciously admit that we have nothing good to expect from them and that it is no longer time to compromise. To grasp the mechanisms of this neo-society in their effectiveness and negativity is also to understand that there is no inevitability here, that another form of world is entirely possible.
The communalist project that we, along with others, are presenting in this workshop is now beyond mere utopia, offering practical organizational forms that are just waiting to be implemented everywhere through the implementation of direct democracy, abolishing hierarchies and many of the divisions that poison the world today.
There is still no room for despair.
