buttpicker

There's a subject that for a long time has been out of any analysis, it was even believed that it was overcome, but evidently these days bring it up again with a new spirit, and that we're all seen that it's already part of the moral atmosphere in which we're absorbed. I'm talking about the anti-system movements that we see emerging, like mushrooms after the financial stock-market rain, everywhere. The sixties, at the end of the decade, left a lesson that all those who lived that process had incorporated to their lives, but that it's hard to pass it on the new generations.

How to explain so much mental immaturity if today, the very people who were leaders of that can't understand why they were like that back then.

Among the conclusions that are deduced of that, talking about May of 1968 first, Woodstock in 1969 later and, the others, the militia and the military of the cold war, there are a couple of aspects that aren't considered, but are the ones that now emerge directly or indirectly. The anti-system movements, whether the ideological sign they have, they bear within its evolution and development a chain of internal happenings that are innate to all of them. They begin with a total, absolute and definitive rupture and they end assimilated and completely functionals to the system they fought so much. When we read Proudhon, for example and we see the great bitterness left in him, due to the failure of the Paris Commune and the whole “regressive” series of happenings that came later, we feel that we're before a kind of eternal figure which occur as a consequence of wanting to remain coherent after a political failure that has social and cultural consequences.

In the following thoughts written quickly I will try to give my fully personal interpretation of what I believe it really happens.

The rupture

The rupture begins as a generalized uproar of rebellious nature against the ruling social order. Young people and some angry seniors against the system in which they live. The most unbelievable things are said in which we come to find out that all what was done is wrong: education, personal ethics, public morals, the ruling culture, technology, corporate hierarchies, urbanization were all conceived for themselves, for their exclusive and selfish use, by very evil people and, therefore, what is all about is not falling “in the mistake” of aspiring small reforms, that only can favor those bad people (imperialist, rich and all that), but we have to turn the things around “like an ankle bone”, because who “doesn't change everything, nothing changes”. Small reforms, according to that angry mood, are only useful for one thing, patching an order of things that demands to be knocked down immediately.

The most unbelievable things are heard and all kinds of classical texts come up to justify any angry mood. From the point of view of the anarchists, who generally are the ones behind all this, the mankind must aspire “the true freedom” and not the false freedom of free market, because that ”bourgeois” freedom, is the freedom of the fox in the henhouse. As the ”bourgeoisie” handles it, according to them, freedom isn't free, it only works for some people to die of starvation and others of liver disease.

From the point of view of the marxists, who generally go next to the anarchists and start prodding them to tranquilize them, in order to enter the kingdom of freedom we must overcome the kingdom of necessity. Only when the basic objective conditions that allow us to overcome the kingdom of necessity are given, already then we can aspire to the kingdom of freedom: what that rebellion expresses, according to that way of seeing things, is an insurrectional prerevolutionary state which lacks maturity to move to the critical consciousness of the group of laborers, the only holders of the real change, lever of history, leader of the events. As according to them the moral condemns what history condemns, then the marxist or “Marxian”, influenced by Lenin makes “pedagogy of masses” in that insurrectional state and moves away and hides, no sooner “the masses start to lower their arms”. It's the way of gathering strength for the qualitative jump that is missing for moving to suggesting a new, fairer, more human social order, without exploited nor exploiters, that sets the mankind free from the capital oppression.

In this series of deliriums is also present the catholic militant position, according to which, the Oppressed People is the Lord of the History, called upon to carry out a christian consciousness in the evolution of events. We come to find out on that side that Christ came to sort it out and because of Saint Peter the true message of the apostle was twisted. Christ gave his fight against the system and he was clear, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's.” in a rupture in which “whosoever will save his life shall lose it, whosoever will lose his life shall find it”. The good man Jesus, said in the end that he wasn't of this world and a crucial assertment fits here: Don't come to me with the things of another marxian!

To the rupture are attached other collateral positions, for example the left-wing liberalism, in permanent self-criticism with certain positions of the French Revolution, rediscovering Robespierre, or very similar positions to the internal discussions at the Paris Commune, according to which we come to find out that what matters is not the political, the social, the economical and the cultural things but “the organization of the manual work and the intellectual work, as embryonic supporters of a whole unfair order”. The ones who mess with the very Enlightenment of the 18th century and the Enlightened Despotism aren't missing.

There are also the others, the mystics, the ones who come and say that the Western people haven't understood in the Prana value and lacking of a super consciousness –a consciousness of consciousness- they can't expand their minds beyond the merely material, sordid and philistine, that's why they miss the way, when they rebel with materialist motivations. The way of the true moral rupture, for them, is the nirvana and the end of all desire.

There are also crossed fertilizations, people who are marxists and roussonians, all together, like Roland Barthes, saying too loosely that he was marxist and roussonian because the rupture with capitalism implies a return to nature. We come to find out this way that to be against capitalism inside capitalism, is the great mistake of classical marxism because it ends up betraying itself in it's basic principles. In order to be a true marxist one has to return to nature, like Rousseau wanted. Rousseau said: “Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Maker of the world, but degenerates once it gets into the hands of man”, and from there is implied that capitalism is something more than a simple socioeconomic phenomenon, it begins being an immorality, a garbage.

To this attaches today, other kind of people, the ones who say that capitalism is useless, ruin, miserable and completely atrocious and that the only, true solution to things is in the Quran.

As one can appreciate, any philosophical tendency can take part in the rebellion and coming out saying that capitalism is no good and what it's really wonderful is the Ming dynasty or anything. We all remember, for example, the Mao Zedong texts, lifting a fight slogan that said: “Down with Feudalism! Down with Imperialism! Down with the evil Jun Fa!” (The Jun Fas were the warlords who ruled China in the 1920s.)

The rupture and after

Once the rupture takes shape and is generalized, internal voices start to appear at first very rarefied that say things like: “We all know that the system is totally, absolutely unfair from head to toes, what it's about is to make a way out suggesting better things. It's not enough with limiting oneself to be against, we must offer an alternative solution to that order of things that is unfair by nature”. We are in front of the first rational, sane, common-sense position. At first “they preach in the dessert” of so much generalized discomfort, but at a certain moment they start to win internal positions and more people adapts to the idea that being against is insufficient, an alternative approach is needed to intervene.

The sane approach generally in this context of big discomfort, is usually made by the marxism with arguments of this kind: “It's not about protesting, anyone who's against can protest, what it's all about is fighting and to fight as a fighter against the system, we need a scientific theory of what is going on. It's very huge the filth that we must dump in the process of socialist reconstruction, we can't improvise the magnitude of the task with voluntarism, ignoring in what stage of the things we are today”.

The anti-system movement, begins there to stop being as such and starts a cycle that it's classical in all of them. At a certain moment someone says: “Is not enough to have an alternative approach and with complete sense to want to make visible something that is clear for us, but isn't clear for the rest of the people, we need to win political spaces that are referential in order to have influence and weigh”. We're before a second moment of sanity. Other moments follow that, until someone says: “Is not enough with winning spaces and condemn ourselves to look from outside what in the end others who have power of decision do, we need to be there, and change things from there”. They create a political party, they register, they nominate. If they're lucky they win a parliament seat.

And there happens something that is important to understand. The Parliament places on them the entirety of the national subjects to consideration. They aren't ready for that, they come from a single subject and they're worried about a single aspect of things. It was Trotsky who said, “revolutionary infantilism, isn't fighting, fighting and fighting: revolutionary infantilism is to make of a single subject, the central issue of revolution”. The Parliament changes them, not because they “become bourgeois”, but because they're not ready to give an answer to the entirety of social, economical and political issues that are on discussion everyday.

The parliamentary success, achieving laws in accordance to what they think, dictates the death of all the movement they had behind them. Who's gonna start demonstrating today, for women's vote of for the divorce laws, or the eight hour workday! Those movements died the day a law guaranteed what they were advocating.

What is not kept in mind is this: If the so hated system comes out unharmed in these anti system trances is because the rule of law, just like we conceived it from the French, British and American revolution until now is the one in charge of resolving the social clashes and harmonizing for the things to be the fairest and most reasonable as possible on every historic event.

The anti-system movements don't have any other fate but to strengthen with fairer laws the system they fight against, so we need to cut it out once and for all. If the system looks invincible today beyond its financial crisis, is because in the past it was absorbing all those things that spoiled its basic functioning. The system wasn't made by someone evil, ”bourgeois”, “imperialist” or such ugly things, we each and every one of us have been building the system election after election, law by law, agreement by agreement. Those who don't understand this, will end with a huge bitterness like Proudhon, seeing traitors to the cause everywhere.

It's true, all what the anarchist says is what occurs, what he can't explain, such slender and pure creature is why is that, what inevitably always happens. He doesn't even suspect at all, that it must be, because the issue is not that way.

About free software

In fact it's the opposite of what they think: The one who wants to change everything happens to be the one who ends up changing nothing, and the ones who aspire to small changes are the ones that in the end change everything.

In the concrete case of the free software and the rules that should exist in the net for the functioning to be equitable and fair for everybody, we are in front of a collection of things, but not an anti-systemic proposal. It's the opposite, they're advocating for more people to learn to code their machine and work with judgment autonomy, for them to be able to design their ventures in a way that allows the training and the development of emerging market niches where they can expand the new creations.

Web browsing, taking advantage of the resources the web offers, using cutting-edge technology manufactured by multinationals and being against the system, all together at the same time, is such a huge contradiction that can't fit on a sane head. Is not understanding what is going on at the level of corporations. We're not in front of a rupture against the system: even if the stock exchanges keep cracking, we're at the doors of another model of capitalism, more open, more equitable, more including, but capitalism after all.

Free software it's inside this process: for the “all free of charge” student, for who wants to deal a fee. The existence of resistance to this in important sectors, has the same reach that could have the oppositions to capitalism in the time when ludism setting out against industrial machines. It's an already lost battle, by the simple reason that today there are a billion and half users on internet, and that quantity is growing in a vertiginous way. That people will create a new system of production, distribution, commercialization and consumption that demands an integrating opening for being able to earn money and living. They're not against the system, they are the system demanding to broaden.

Like Mortimer Adler said, the mistake of capitalism is that it's conceived for a few and the mistake of those who fight against capitalism is not realizing that in the end, what they advocate and achieve, are capitalistic achievements, not another thing. What is needed is a revolution for more capitalism, he said, not for less, even if that implies to step of the feet of those who think they own a system that came to overcome all the previous, when in fact is the whole planet today, wh's requesting better levels of production and consumption.

From China to Russia, like Carlos Gardel sang “We ran out of naives that were way back ago”.