CRACK CAPITALISM

see Mattini's La Politica como Subversion (2000) and Agnoli's Subversive
Theorie (1999).
22. See Marcuse (1956/1998: 16).
23. 'Without face, without voice' (sin voz, sin rostra), as the Zapatistas put it.
24. On the role of the clowns in the anti-G8 protests around Gleneagles, see
the various articles in Harvie et al. (2007).
25. This is the concept developed by Scott in his important work on latent
rebellion: Scott (1990).
THESIS 29
1. Virno (2004: 102).
2. Benjamin, in Thesis XV of his 'Theses on the Philosophy of History'
(1940/1969), reports an incident that occurred during the July revolution
of 1830: 'On the first evening of fighting it turned out that the clocks in the
towers were being fired on simultaneously and independently from several
places in Paris.'
3. In similar vein, see Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence, in which
the king's favourite wife is the creation of his own imagination. The queen
worries about the implications of this in theological and in personal terms:
'If God turned his face away from his creation, Man, would Man simply
cease to be? That was the large-scale version of the question, but it was
the selfish, small-scale versions that bothered her. Was her will free of the
man who had willed her into being? Did she exist only because of his
suspension of disbelief in the possibility of her existence?' (2009: 49). That
is the mortal terror of the capitalist: if we who create capitalism turn our
face away from our creation, it will cease to exist. It is this terror that is
the key to understanding the police, the armies, the violence of the world,
not to mention its educational systems, its universities.
4. Borges offers the English translation in the original (Spanish) story.
5. For a discussion of carpe diem as a revolutionary principle and its dangers,
see Bloch (195911986: Ch. 20).
6. See the title of Lenin (1920/1968): "'Left-wing" Communism - An infantile
disorder'.
7. And see Vaneigem in an article in La Jornada of 2 January 2008: 'I do not
have the pretension of jVenceremos!, I just wish that there should grow
in strength in every woman and every man that "We want to live" that is
the spontaneous cry of infancy. It is from that infancy that the infancy of
the world to which we aspire shall be born.' More generally, on childhood
and philosophy, see Kohan (2003), Agamben (2007).
8. La Jornada, 25 August 1996.
9. On this, see Vaneigem (1967/1994).
10. Here, as in much else, I follow Richard Gunn.
11. Quoted in Honderich (1995: 97).
12. Note that the idea of communism as the pursuit of the nunc stans is a central
idea in Bloch's philosophy. See Bloch (1964 (I): 107) on nunc stans, and
(1959/1986: especially Ch. 53, III).
13. This is the name of a pamphlet by the Leeds May Day Group (2004). See
also their discussion of the intensity of events in Free Association (2005).
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