In Memory of Raoul Vaneigem
(1934-2026)
Via Atelier d’Écologie Sociale et Communalisme || It is futile to expect the arrogance of the state and the greed of multinationals to tolerate our resolve to establish and spread collectives hostile to all forms of power—starting with the plundering of natural resources. But let it be equally clear that we have absolutely no intention of tolerating their repression, carried out with boots and helmets, and supported by journalistic cowardice. We will not bow down to the programmed destruction of life within us and around us.
Life is our only demand. We reject its diminished, truncated, sacrificed version. We want it to be sovereign. We want it to constantly create and recreate our existence and our environment. For us, it is the driving force of a society where the harmonization of individual and collective desires is the fruit of a passionate experience. To further such an undertaking, we have no other weapons than life itself.
The profit-driven hordes, the money-crazed addicts, the mechanical puppets whose only intelligence lies in the gears—these are our true enemies. The mafia wars they wage against each other are not ours, they don’t concern us.
They know everything about death because it is the only thing they know how to give. They know nothing of the riches that life bestows upon those who know how to receive them. Creativity and imagination, which every child, every woman, every man possesses when he listens to his will to live, are an unknown territory to them.
Functionality kills. Poetry is a perpetual rebirth.
The repressive power of the State lies less in its police force than in the State within us, the internalized State, which hammers us with its fear, its guilt, its cleverly programmed despair.
Cultivating the gardens of earthly life (there are no others) means inventing territories that, offering no purchase to the enemy—no appropriation, no power, no representation—render us elusive. Not invincible, but inalienable, like life itself, which its perpetual rebirth liberates from its ancestral yoke. No destruction will ever overcome an experience we are determined to repeat without respite.
From childhood, every human being possesses a playful genius. It is this genius that the struggle for life rekindles: the poetry it instills restores the energy drained from them by the absurd, competitive struggles of survival and labor. Do not be surprised that from its tiny sparks ignites a world yearning for the illuminations of joy, of which it has been robbed.
