The passing of one generation will be
sufficient for making precariousness
the most widespread social condition.
Thus we, the children of the industrial
world, will find ourselves to be increasingly
useless, in the same position, in
fact, as the crowds of undesirables that
landed on our shores. With the passing
of years and the stablizing of this
situation all those movements that try
to give support to circumscribed portions
of the exploited (immigrants,
unemployed, precarious, etc.) from the
outside will lose meaning. The conditions
of exploitation will be similar
for all, thus opening the door to truly
common struggles wide. Here at last the
thread is discovered that unites us all,
the exploited of a thousand lands, heirs
of such different histories: capital itself
has reunited the lost communities of the
human species in misery. The life that
is sketched out for us on the horizon
will be lived commonly under the mark
of precariousness. Carefully prepared
by the development of exploitation, here
are the modern material bases for the
ancient dreams of freedom, here is the
place of the coming revolts.
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
The Undesirables was originally a one-shot paper published in
Italian and French with a Spanish translation planned by the
originally publishers. Its analyses of the changes in the tools and
methods of exploitation and domination that have happened in
recent years were significant, so I translated it into English as a
pamphlet. The refusal of those who wrote these brief pieces to
accept the simplistic non-analysis of those who cry perpetually
over “globalization”, their insistence on recognizing the unity of
exploitation throughout the world—i.e., that the exploited of the
so-called first world are not privileged but simply experiencing a
somewhat different intensity of exploitation—and their
insistence on the recognition of the very real and significant
power of the state in the functioning of exploitation and
domination has allowed them to present an analysis that remains
truly revolutionary—a useful tool for those who seek a rupture
with the present social order. Particularly important in light of
recent debates in anarchist circles is the authors’ insistence that a
critique of technology that does not include class analysis is a
partial critique and that class analysis without a critique of
technology is equally insufficient.
I find their analyses of the particular effects of post-industrial
technology quite significant, but feel that they underplay the
importance of social control in the original development of the
factory system itself—the idea of a liberatory use of industrial
technology was always an illusion—so just as the dream of
going back to a “nicer” form of capitalism is delusional, so also
is that of going back to a “nicer” form of industrialism. I suspect
the authors of these pieces would agree, but it is a question that
they left unclear. These texts are tools for discussion and the development of
analyses among those who want to create projects aimed at the
destruction of the present society with its basis in exploitation
and domination, those who dream of lives and relationships built
on desires freed from the domination of the market and the state.
In other words, for those who are beginning to create the new
lucid and revolutionary luddism that the dream of free life
demands in this world.
There are ever increasing numbers of undesirables in the
world. There are too many men and women for whom this
society has not provided any role except that of croaking in order
to make everyone else function. Dead to the world or to
themselves: this is the only way society wants them.
Jobless, they serve to goad anyone who has a job to whatever
humiliations in order to tightly hold on to it. Isolated, they serve
to make those who are recognized as citizens believe they have a
real life in common (between the stamped documents of
authority and the market benches). Immigrants, they serve to
give the illusion of having roots to anyone who—being
proletarian with no offspring left at home—is despised by his
own children and left only with her nothingness in the
workplace, in the subway and in front of the television.
Undocumented, they serve to remind us that wage slavery is not
the worst thing—there is forced labor and fear of control that
tightens at every patrol. Expelled, they serve to blackmail all the
economic refugees of capitalist genocide with the fear of a
journey toward misery without return. Prisoners, they serve to
threaten all those who no longer want to resign themselves to
this miserable existence with the specter of punishment.
Extradited as enemies of the state, they serve to make it
understood that in the International of power and of exploitation
there is no space for the bad example of revolt.
Poor, isolated, everywhere strangers, prisoners, outlaws,
bandits: the conditions of these undesirables are increasingly
common. Thus, the struggle can make itself common, on the
basis of the refusal of a life that is becoming more precarious and
artificial every day. Citizen or foreigner, innocent or guilty,
undocumented or regularized: the distinctions of state codes
don't pertain to us. Why would solidarity have to accept these
social boundaries when the poor are continually tossed from one
to the other?
Our solidarity is not with the misery, but with the vigor with
which men and women do not put up with it.
http://anti-politics.net/distro/download/undesireables-imposed.pdf
