Squandering: the case for disrespectful opportunism

 

 

Promises

 

Why do people work? If they are not insane, they do it for the money. And what do they need this money for? To buy freedom from work. At the same time, money seems to be necessary to escape from the money-obsession of the poor, just like work seems to be necessary to escape from the work-obsession of the unemployed. The apparent non sequitur of these connections is the description of the logical loop in which most humans live and function in today’s society. Strangely enough, the very origin of their endless tail-chasing seems to be their desire to achieve a state of freedom, that is, an escape form the loop itself.

 

How could the human desire for freedom turn into a self-perpetuating and enslaving mechanism? Within the contemporary landscape, the answer lies in the way capitalism, as it always does, manages to take our requests to the letter, and to return them to us realized, if slightly modified. That slight modification, as we all know, is the tiny poison pill that turns all our ‘realized’ demands into even stricter chains. This is how, over the years, capitalism realized the requests for flexible work, sexual liberation, democracy, and so on. Capitalism always gives us what we want, but it does so in such a way that brings to reality the darkest warnings of the old saying, ‘be careful what you wish for’.

 

In the case of our demand for freedom from work and money, the poison pill inserted by capitalism is the sublimation of our desire into a promise. The purest type of promise: that ever-lasting ideal, which always lingers and never makes itself concrete. In this sense, it is revealing the way capitalist mainstream media depict the ‘good life’ to which we all are called to aspire. What is life like, in a happy Hollywood film or in a celebrity magazine? For the most part, it is a life without work and without the need for money. For strange it might seem, the promise of ‘making it’, in the capitalist discourse, implies an exit from the cage of capitalism. And yet, in reality, we will never be able to earn enough money to get out of work, we will never be able to work enough to get out of the obsession for money. Freedom is always just a few more office-years away, always a few more bank-account-zeros away. We will get stuck in a vicious cycle, forever chasing, forever hoping.

 

Hope

 

Hope, a monster we have already encountered elsewhere. In religion, for example, where the belief in the promised return of the Messiah isn’t but a ripped kite made out of hope. We have found it in all millenarian religions, and, above all, in the religion of revolution. Revolution, the umpteenth carrot at the end of the stick – a stick, once again, made of the same hard work and self-sacrifice invoked by the Christians as well as the capitalists. In the discourse of its decrepit churches, such as those of today’s ‘revolutionary socialism’, revolution lingers in the air as the lightest of all promises. Like the ethereal promise of Hollywood, revolution waves in front of us a cinematic prospect of unknown pleasures. A paradise which is always a bit further, along the rough road of revolutionary work. Just a few more marches away, a few more books away, a few more party cards away. As in the case of capitalism, it is thanks to the endless procrastination of hope that the revolutionary discourse can maintain the implausible flight of its celestial promises. Implausible, indeed, as the actual historical realization of the revolutionary discourse is hardly more than a sequence of defeats and massacres, with the occasional blossoming of the totalitarian nightmare.

 

Economically, we could interpret the immaterial stock of hope prodigally distributed by capitalist and ‘revolutionary’ institutions as the retribution to their hard-working adepts. A wage which resembles that of the legendary Hasan-i Sabbah, the first grandmaster of the sect of the Assassins, who used to repay his adepts sent to dangerous missions with a generous supply of hashish. Like a drug, hope endlessly calls for more hope. As the floor of hope grows thin under the hard-working believer, more hope is needed. To the point that, as one’s life nears its end, the strongest cut of hope becomes necessary: hope in the future wellbeing of one’s family, for the worker under capitalism, and hope for the future emancipation of humanity, for the worker of revolution.

 

In this world of deluded workers, feeding on hope and sweating pain, it is important to identify the equation that holds together the circle work-hope-work. Its algorithm is deeply set inside the structure of a promise, that is, of the trick of magic loading present actions with an arbitrary value, to be redeemed as an investment in a hypothetical future. No rational connections are necessary, between the type of action performed and the value which is supposed to derive from it. How else could we interpret the connection between senseless, humiliating, soul destroying jobs within capitalism, and their promise of delivering a future freedom? Or, in the revolutionary discourse, between the hard-work of the ‘old mole’, or of the isolated, minoritarian militant, and the utterly unlikely outcome of a general uprising against crashingly superior forces?

 

A promise is a work of hypnotism, which stupefies and seduces, while wrapping itself as a corset around its gullible audience.

 

Squandering

 

But promises don’t come without their antidote. Throughout history, this antidote has proved able to dissolve not only the promises of capitalism and of revolution, but also other, more ancient, and possibly more alluring ones. Revealingly, the name of this antidote bears heavy negative connotations in today’s parlance: squandering.

 

In southern Italy, the art of squandering has been practiced diligently for centuries by individuals belonging to the aristocracy, one of the most hated yet often most refined social categories. Upon inheriting their family fortune, countless southern Italian aristocrats opposed the mephitic promises of honor, wealth and status with squandering. Despite some shallow similarities, aristocratic squandering never had anything to do with the ever-celebrated, indigenous practice of potlatch, where goods are distributed or even destroyed in order to show one’s wealth or to reinforce one’s social status within their community. Innate to the aristocratic ethic (and especially so in the periods of its decay) was a silent yet firm despising both wealth and social norms, let alone those of status. Its reasons had more to do with the pleasure and the enjoyment of the individual and of his or her circle of friends, rather than with any external impositions. The aristocrat’s dissipation of their family wealth was at the same time part of their quest for enjoyment, and a step towards their liberation from the constraints of their social role, as reproduced by the ‘due respect’ which they were supposed to pay to their inheritance. Squandering was, for them, a way of breaking that promise which would otherwise have made them slaves to their role, as faceless, impersonal reproducers of the aristocratic order. After all, the ‘fortune’ they inherited – from the latin fortuna – is etymologically associated both with material wealth and with one’s fate or destiny. It is easy to see the destructive impact of squandering on the destiny of southern Italian aristocracy, if one looks at the historical fate of the much more ‘respectful’ aristocracy of Great Britain: whereas Italy lost its traditional aristocratic class, mostly because of its active self-destruction^[1] [1], Britain still very much maintains its aristocracy as a consistent section of its ruling class.

 

How could we apply the art of squandering to our current position? Unfortunately, none of us are aristocrats, and our family fortunes would hardly be enough for one day of luxurious dissipation. But our material possessions are not what we should look at. Rather, we should focus our attention on the immense, overflowing stock of hope that we have accumulated over our years of hard work, both as employees and as ‘revolutionaries’. We have plenty of ‘fortune’ to squander there.

 

Like monetary wealth, hope is founded on the general acceptance of a series of social conventions which associate value measures with arbitrarily chosen, symbolic objects. In the case of hope, however, the outpouring of value is not directed at material objects – as is the case with the valourisation of the money object – but to one’s actions, understood as immaterial containers of value. It is through the acceptance of the promise-system that one’s actions become loaded with a certain quantity of hope: you work a certain amount of hours, and you can aspire to a certain amount of freedom from work; you militate diligently for a certain number of years and you can aspire to the quicker approach of the revolutionary utopia; and so on.

 

Just like money functions as a means of exchange only within a money system, the stock of hope thus acquired is not spendable outside the very system which created its originating promise in the first place. One’s acquisition of hope through work can never lead to an exit from the system of the promise – that is, to its realization and to the achievement of one’s freedom – as it is bound to reproduce the same system ad infinitum. Also, as time goes by, one ends up investing too much time and energy in acquiring his or her stock of hope, for it to be lost upon the actual realization of its originating promise.  A perverse process which explains, at least in part, the seemingly absurd vocation for defeat of most contemporary revolutionary movements. What would be of the revolutionary hope of the militants, if the revolution was ever to be achieved?

 

Disrespectful Opportunism

 

This is the point in which the art of squandering becomes extremely useful. Squandering hope, like squandering money, is first of all an act of disrespect. If respect – from the latin respicere – is etymologically associated with the act of ‘looking back at’ something, then disrespect is the act of not looking back, of looking away from something. To disrespect a promise, for the one who is offered it, thus means to avert one’s eyes from the value-making spectacle of the promise’s tricks. This is how, upon squandering their family fortunes, decaying aristocrats looked away from the socially constructed value of their possessions, focusing instead on the immediate use they could extract from them.

 

In this sense, a disrespectful attitude carries a strong opportunistic element. Opportunism, intended as privileging the seizing of opportunities available to one over one’s obedience to a prescribed behaviour, is the natural attitude of an individual freed from the normative constraints of all social promises. As a promise-free individual – that is, as a true a-theist or an-archist – one is clearly inclined to perceive his or her own possibilities of action as desirable or undesirable opportunities, rather than as socially acceptable or prescribed moral duties.

 

Applied to our contemporary condition, such disrespectful, opportunistic behaviour reveals itself as a powerful weapon in the struggle against an all-too-real monster, whose two bodies, capitalism and revolution, conjoin in only one head, work.

 

In the face of capitalism’s promise of granting freedom through work, today’s squanderers respond with a rational understanding of work for what it really is: an almost unavoidable humiliation from which one should seize for oneself all there is to take, in view of one’s own dreams, desires and necessities. Instead of falling into the dichotomy between an absolute refusal of activity under capitalism – thus reverting to an ascetic or new age pauperism – or the absolute submission to its rule – typical of the believing, career-oriented worker – the opportunist finds a northwest passage through such difficult territories. He or she might decide to act professionally for a while, if this is in his or her best interest, or even to temporarily and only formally submit to the rules of workplace hierarchy, if this helps him or her in their quest for their own aims. In their relationship to work, the opportunist banishes from his or her mind any issues of social shame and ideological inconsistency, favouring instead a cold-blooded pragmatism: what is the most useful behaviour to maintain, in order to better and more quickly achieve one’s own aims, that is, one’s own dreams, desires and necessities?

 

Since, realistically, it is hard to avoid passing through the world of work, the opportunist enters it with the attitude of the looter and the ruthlessness of the deceiver. The gift of honesty, and especially that of publicly presenting one’s true aims and reasons, so often myopically invoked by many radicals, should be kept for other, more worthy spaces. For work, we should reserve all the lies we have. After all, we have long understood on our own skin how the worst possible treatment we might receive is that of being deceived and exploited: we should unleash this same type of treatment onto our worst enemies, capitalism and work. Opportunism, in this sense, has to be understood as a practical, everyday form of violence to be used against our structural enemies, with the aim of achieving a victory which is not that of an ever-fading freedom, but of an immediate state of autonomy for oneself.

 

We should take the material and immaterial productions of capitalism within our reach and use them ruthlessly, squandering them, taking them for a ride and dropping them as soon as their use is over. In this sense, we might find inspiration in the mass looting of the ‘consumers’ riots’ of August 2011 in London. Despite what many pointy-headed commentators bothered saying on those events, it is most unlikely that the looters truly believed to be able to steal and indefinitely keep the fruit of their robberies. Rather, I think they did so with the same attitude with which an aristocrat would expropriate a horse from one of his subjects, ride it for one day and then abandon it. They looted for the hell of it, and maybe to wear those trainers or use those plasma screens just for a day, then possibly resell or dump them somewhere. Rightly so, many mainstream journalists defined those days of unrest as anarchy: in fact, anarchy is nothing but aristocracy for all.

 

It is important to note how the violent art of squandering does not contain any traces of irony. Squanderers oppose the postmodern resignation of irony – with its distance between the oppressed and the oppressor, which allows the maintenance of oppression itself among disarmed smiles – with a full penetration into the territory of their enemy: the wild entry of the pillager, not that of the tourist, the deceitful arrival of the spy, not that of the prisoner.

 

Squandering is an extremely serious business, which requires the concentration necessary to handle dangerous, promise-loaded goods without falling into their trap. It requires a mix of willful ignorance – of the values and promises deployed all around us by our adversaries – and a constant furthering of one’s knowledge and understanding of his or her own aims, and of those shared with one’s comrades.

 

The same attitude functions beautifully in reference to the discourse of revolution. We should enter it like savages entering a library. Burning the books that are of no use, stealing the pages that offer us useful words, misinterpreting them if necessary. We should take the idols of past revolutionaries, lined along the walls like statues of saints, and chop off their heads: there is no better place for the head of a saint than on top of a stick. We will swear no obedience to any party-line or glorious tradition, but we will take advantage of any situation of social revolt created by wannabe revolutionaries: if there is something in it for us, then we are going to take it without signing the form or doing the salute.

 

In order to free ourselves from the fraudulent imperatives of revolution and from the paralysis of the endless waiting for the parousia – only occasionally interrupted by pathetically impotent marches, or by equally pathetic, merely self-validating assemblies – we opportunists should reject the tiresome discourse of ‘changing the world’. Changing our lives would be enough of a change! What is the use of sacrificing our lives for the impossible demands of our revolutionary superego, if we, as promise-free atheists, do not believe that a celestial life awaits us after death? Furthermore, if Marx used to believe (so far mistakenly) that the proletariat attaining its own emancipation would free all humanity, we could certainly respond by stating that the individual ruthlessly attaining his or her own emancipation by all means necessary, will provide all other individuals who compose humanity with an example of how to free themselves. Of course, only if they have active will to, as emancipation can never be given but only taken.

 

 

Deserters and Slaves

 

In the war waged for centuries against individual humans by the regime of work – under different names, such as capitalism, revolution, and so on – we shall play the part of the ignominious deserters, pillaging the armories and the barracks’ kitchens. If caught, we shall be quick at hiding ourselves, or adopting a disguise, or, if necessary, destroying our adversaries. Yet, never, under any circumstances, shall we try and convince anyone of the rightness of our position or, worse, to try and win them over to our fight. Although we don’t owe any respect to the abstract names of our adversaries and to their macabre beliefs, we still shall be able to look at ourselves in the mirror, as innocents of any cruelty. Nothing, of all things, is more cruel than trying to change someone’s mind or to take over his or her mental autonomy and free will. Even when faced by slaves, we shall let them be slaves: to free them would be the worst act of cruelty, and a dangerous move. It is guaranteed that freed slaves, who did not free themselves through their own struggle, will be the first ones to turn into the secret police and the prison guards of the post-revolutionary nightmare.

 

Wild dogs, upon meeting their tame fellows, possibly employed as guardians of their master’s mansion, do not waste time laughing at them, or exchanging thoughts. They sneak around them, silently, and whenever possible, they steal their food.