antagonism 

 

undercurrent

 

 

 

six

seven

eight

 

 

 

“THE CONTEMPORARY TRAVELLER is not the traveller of the azure fields of Rimbaud, who ran in the frenzied splashing of the tides, with a mind less obedient than a child’s; neither is he the sailor of Baudelaire, the curious explorer who faces Eldorado, the gift that Fate had promised him. He does not resemble the decisive wanderer, the nomad of Isabelle Emberheart who is everywhere at home, alone, poor in needs, away from family, property and permanent job.

The modern traveller is the alienated, temporary computer user in the ‘neutral zone’ of the techno-cities, in which the corpse of counter-culture’s trip is exposed in the windows of its shopping centres. He is the farmer of Chiapas, dragged from the land he thought was his, only to be sent to the shanty-towns of Mexico City and to the industrial zones. He is the homeless person of the metropolis who wanders day and night under the shadow of vast skyscrapers. He is the ‘guaranteed’ worker, the one who has so far won the position of fastest rabbit in the game of carrot and stick and who now sees his plunder gradually disappear into the horizon. He is the ‘guaranteed’ worker, the one She is the immigrant, symbolic figure of the mobile work force, the extreme form of the modern traveler, which the force of capital has blown miles from the place she once regarded as ‘home’. He is the black worker whose brutal submission can no longer be disguised behind the illusion of being ‘alternative’. He is the mobile worker. He is all of us, whose common assets are being the air we breathe, the space in which we live, the language we speak, our own bodies. We are forced to struggle everyday for survival in order to forget life itself.

The fiery words of blood that inscribe the history of the unmasking of the unfree in times of division and isolation, have never shined more than they do today. The fragmentations that Marx described are completed today. We are fenced in and divided. Capital sought to tear our community into pieces by stepping on our mistakes, on the alienated product of our struggle. We become homeless and involuntary travellers, wanderers in an alien world that presents nothing new to us. Will we ever enjoy another drunken sleep on the beach now that the only drunken- ness to which the wanderer is allowed to give himself to is the intoxication of the commodity?

Our class must become the negation of negation. The pieces of the proletariat must be welded together. Nothing is permanently lost and the rage is already boiling. The meeting of the permanently temporary and the temporarily permanent workers is near. And with it will dawn of the expropriation of the expropriators.

We have no illusions. The horizon is blurred. Yet we cannot overlook the fact that we can already trace at least the objective terms for another International. The last one."

 April 1995

(translated from the greek magazine: TPTG )