through europe

Prologue

Looking around ourselves today, we realize that we have already seen all this. It wasn’t quite the same in terms of style; skirts were longer, kids were wearing shorts, cars were slower and fewer, and everything was in black and white. Yet, we have seen all this before. We have encountered it in history books, or in the tales of our grandparents. We have met it in the novels of Faulkner and Musil, or in the pig-faced paintings of Grosz. We forgot about it long ago, since we started to repeat to ourselves that its atrocious offspring would never come back to life. Never again. And yet, he is coming back now. Once again, we are living in the nervous times, pregnant with the monster.

We are the last ones. We’ve always been, even if we didn’t realize. We were the last ones in 1968, when, as youth, we threw ourselves against everything, whether that was just in our little town, just in our thoughts. We were the last ones in 1977, when the future collapsed over us. The last ones in the 1980s, stuck within, in the 1990s, in the 2000s... After us, work will be something completely different. After us, retirement will be no more. After us, nothing. Of all things that we have been, punk is the only one that really stuck with us, whether we wanted it to or not. We are the pensioners, and we aren’t finished yet.

0 - 1676: Scrive Spinoza, nel suo Trattato Politico (IV, 4), che il potere politico pecca - viene meno alla sua ragion d’essere - quando pensa di poter fare quello che vuole di una cosa che considera in suo possesso. Persino la proprietà insomma, fonte ultima dell’unico nómos ancora positivo in terra, esiste all’interno d’un limite, superato il quale essa diviene impedimento, dominio parassitario sul libero dispiegarsi della vita collettiva. «Analogamente - continua il filosofo - se pure diciamo che gli uomini non godono del loro diritto, ma sono soggetti al diritto della società civile ciò non significa che hanno cessato di essere uomini per acquistare un’altra natura, e che quindi la società abbia diritto di far sì che gli uomini [...] riguardino con tutti gli onori cose che provocano il riso o la nausea». Se il potere costituito dà mostra delle sue corruzioni, o viola e disprezza le leggi che s’è dato e sulle quali si regge, se impedisce la vita della collettività o rapina gli uomini e le donne allora «il timore si trasforma in indignazione».

Disclaimer: God

There are several ways of understanding an object or a phenomenon. We can talk about its essence, its form, its origin... We can also understand it according to its way of being productive. I would like to use this latter point of view. The question, then, is no longer ‘what is it?’, ‘what does it look like?’, ‘where does it come from?’, but rather ‘what does it produce?’, ‘how is it definable according to its production?’.

  – Bardziej niż wybór walk, wyzwaniem jest czasem wybieranie pól walki –

W całej Europie młodzież, pracownicy, bezrobotni, emeryci, migranci i rodziny mierzą się z jednakowo posępnym zestawem środków zaciskania pasa, kapitalistyczną reakcją oraz brutalnością policji. Nie sposób nie przywołać tutaj ulubionego powiedzenia brytyjskiego premiera: w tym historycznym momencie europejskie klasy niższe i średnie rzeczywiście „są w tym wszystkim razem”.