Social Control
Prison Society, Reformism and Insurrection
According to Privacy International, a civil liberties monitor, the United Kingdom is an 'Endemic Surveillance State'. In terms of how much time, money and energy, government and business spend on spying on their population; we are the most observed nation in the world. Britain is a tightly controlled society, but it is evident to us that without substantial resistance, technologies of social control will extend across the whole of the planet, spearheaded by various corporate and State interests. Patricio Pallares Bayona, an anarchist comrade who spent 20 years in jail in Catalonia was stunned when he came to London. Recently released from prison, he said 'in all this time things have changed, now they build prisons on the outside as well'.
The new developments in technologies of social control are being placed everywhere that they can be useful in manipulating and controlling people. So-called 'intelligent' CCTV surveillance networks which recognise faces and other biometrics, detect voice stress levels and 'unusual' behaviour; MMW Cameras, 'x-ray' type devices which visually strip a person to the skin; automatic vehicle tracking systems. The British Government aims for all movements of people and vehicles to be tracked and databased in the next decade. Access to social services, transport network, and consumer services such as retail, banking, Internet & telecommunications subject to intensive monitoring and profiling. These control technologies have enveloped the UK, and they will unfold to totally underpin and maintain the brutal order of the globalised modern society. These partially completed prison-states have completely bypassed the scope and reach of most peoples' understanding and capabilities for intervention. All this is becoming entrenched in society seemingly without neither question nor rebellion. So much so that the people themselves seem paralysed and unable to prevent the all-encompassing penetration of control into their daily lives.
Damaged relationships are endemic because confinement permanently damages the individual. Everywhere social cohesion is disintegrating. One half of the population drugs themselves with ignorance, random violence and consumerism, all because the total alienation and complete loss of meaning could not be so evident. Everyone is condemned to a life of competing for just enough to get by on; dead-end lives in a corrupt society whose future looks bleak.
When the UK media started to cover urban gang shootings on housing estates in January 2007(1), it was in response to youths being shot in drug related feuds. None of this is new, and we know it has been getting worse. No-one is denying this, nor how bad things have become in our communities, nor the pain of losing a brother, sister, parent or child, but something is really missing from how the State wants to remove all context from these senseless killings over money and territory. This isn't just in some isolated ghetto; this is in the suburbs, everywhere. But the question is of what is it going to take for the weapons to be turned against the State and all those who exploit us, not against each other. There is nothing for anyone in these estates. For all the talk of the 'community building' that needs to done, getting exploited in dead-end jobs in a pointless society of self-deceit and exploitation is the cause of the problem, and will never be a solution. Society is open-air technocratic detention centre, maintained by violence, coercion, dispersal and exploitation. Without making a clear break with the entire present way of doing things, the only way that remains is cradle-to-grave prison for all of us.
The repression of assembly, of expression and movement, is nothing short of the will to dominate all popular sentiment of dissent, to crush it out in spirit, through fear, harassment, and imprisonment. The environmental and social reformists have totally failed in their efforts to prevent the destruction of the biosphere and the creation of a murderous neo-liberalist economy. There has been a failure by the leftist ideologues, and reformist organisations to control or mediate the alienation and rage, but they continue to propagate widespread confusion over the extent that technology and consumerism dominates our lives. Without widespread revolt and sabotage leading to the complete overthrow of the entire present order of society and industry, capitalism will destroy the Biosphere; it cannot resolve its contradictions. It will attempt to adapt to the climate chaos by passing laws that suppress free movement of the population. 'Climate Change' will become the new reason for compliance. Industry, militarism and science continue to loot, manipulate and exploit every valuable resource until it is gone.
Every time the media and politicians throw a lie to the public the reformists and liberals take it up. They tell us our direct action is hooliganism, insanity, extremism, terror, that it harms the 'dialogue' with power, that it brings repression, that it is against the 'workers' interests, that now is not the time to act. Political repression exists right now against anyone who questions hierarchy. If we act against the prisons, police and capitalist system we can expect immediate clampdowns. The use of harassment, detainment, torture and murder exists - what deceitful things words become when subservience to power is concealed. It is enough that we act at all in the face of this production-line genocide. We merely move to what our hearts tell us, which is enough to be condemned as a prisoner, one of those excluded from the lie of 'civility', and forced to witness its brutal contradiction: isolation, torture and death.
Technological developments will continue to produce finely tuned prison societies where our entire social relationships are subject to profiling by the information economy and authoritarian control. It is imperative that we act immediately against all forms of exploitation and hierarchy, and generalise the social war on all fronts. There is a need to act immediately against the architects of this prison society, we want more than this in our life times, and in the face of intrusive surveillance and total social control, we will organise and resist. Avoiding payment, the boss, the police, the social contract, and the prisons - it's clear that this is the beginning. However, without destroying the free market, capitalism will cause an imminent ecological collapse: snowballing species extinction, climate chaos and resource exhaustion is here to stay, and is going to get a lot worse. Intervention in environmental and social struggles, against the tendencies of nationalism and statism is critical.
Our perspective has absolutely nothing to do with reformist or representational politics. When anarchists / anti-capitalists participate in social democratic activism for reform without retaining their revolutionary militancy, it dilutes our effectiveness, and our movements become penetrated with ineffective ideas and methods. It creates a theatre of easily policed charades on the street, and weakens our long-term goals of autonomy, free exchange and liberation. Our energy and participation is used by social managers, to lend credibility to their goals, the recuperative power of this process is the absolute negation of grass-roots organisation and practice, and leads to the further ghettoising of anti-capitalist, anti-state ideas. If we participate in trying to convince ourselves and an alienated public that anyone will make any difference to ecological collapse and social exploitation with any symbolic, representational appeal to power and finance, the more time we will have to wait before any real change happens. This is not to say that we should retreat from areas of conflict we have spent time and energy fighting for, only that our actions become more insightful, provocative and uncontrollable, accompanied by a wider spread of information and activities dedicated to free exchange, autonomy and liberation.
In anticipation of a total breakdown of society and industrialism through economic collapse and climate meltdown, it is vital to radically self-organise, and attack the state and the corporations now, increasing pressure. The media parade has to stop, and our carnival of dreams has to begin. Capitalism is a social relationship and cannot be fought through lobbying, or parliamentary means; it must be fought in the streets. Looting supermarkets and chain stores, trashing symbolic targets such as corporate businesses, banks, police stations, embassies etc. is a key part of our presence on the streets. But it is necessary to widen the frame of our activity to encompass a total attack on the infrastructure and capabilities of production of the modern society. It is certainly not enough to cause economic sabotage 2-3 times a year in orchestrated theatres of police management and training. As long as we carry out low-level rioting and minor acts of sabotage we remain marginalised and open to recuperation into our given role as predictable dissent within the spectacle. To be seen by the base population as a credible force able to alter reality in a profound, permanent way. There is a need for a greater visibility of our intention and capability to be a real active threat to the very order of State & Capital.
A threat so large as to wreck the fabric of society and radically transform the situation beyond recognition. We need to think about what it would take to create situations of absolute social breakdown and auto-organisation, to create situations where no-one is able to control the scenario, not the political leaders, the police, military, not anyone, least of all ourselves, the 'political militants'. We need to accelerate this process of rebellion and recognise our long-term aims, and think about the type of disorder that is necessary to get there. It is in these moments that the economic market and hierarchy is fragile, when all things are in motion, but the system frequently gains from chaotic situations, lots of commodities are destroyed and are remade. Media stereotypes are employed in propaganda to bend the minds of the population, and the time passes according to the clock. That is, as long as these events remain within the parameters of recuperation. Successful direct action is propaganda, when done by an individual or on mass. Face-to-face organisation on the basis of affinity, networked informally within mass struggle, is a form of organisation that governments have a difficult task policing. Our subversive project of insurrection and informality is spreading, igniting anti-systemic fires everywhere, burning up the chains of our imagination.
Revolutionary direct action cannot be recuperated, that is why it must be repressed; it communicates action & theory to all. Aiming to provoke an incredible rupture, which could open the realms of the impossible, is a reality.
(1) - Three 15 year-old boys were shot to death over gang related disputes in the space of a week, in London and Manchester, UK.