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Hey there e-philosophy fans! Hello! Hello! And welcome to the show!

It is me -- PQ -- your erstwhile and ancient World Spirit Bro, riding my Unicorn-of-many-colors, once again carrying the Banner of the Negatum forward, against all odds, into the e-dialectical whirlwind.

Let us gird ourselves, my friends, for an e-Life well-lived, and not just for staying alive.



Heh-he. Yeah. OK. Been a while since I did one of these. So how y'all doin'?








Well. As I've often done over the past year or so, let's start with a nod to Leonard Cohen. Here's a few thought-provoking lyrics from "Anthem" for your reading pleasure:

"Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in."








All aboard!

Today's point of departure: Let's explore suggestions for finding the foundations of a New World within the New World, within its very cracks and fissures and disruptions.

Today's question is: By examining the cracks within its existing foundations, or the disasters that surround it, can we detect the shape of an emerging, possible and better New New World?



Cracking eRepublik



Introduction: For a ruthless criticism of everything e-existing...
===================================================================


Let's stand very firmly on no traditions at all.

For myself, my World Spirit unicorn steed and I gleefully trod over many traditions every day, equally dubious of them all. It is good to be wary. After all, in a modern world characterized primarily by a frightening congruence of Stalinism and Global Capitalism, one cannot be too careful -- philosophically speaking, that is.

Yes, dears. Caution should be our byword. And grains of salt our preferred condiment.







For example, even though I am "a man of the Left" -- you might even say I am "an old man of the Left", perhaps even "a very, very, very old and creaky-jointed old man of the Left" -- in fact I have no respect whatsoever for respectable leftist bureaucrats who whine, for example, about the Zapatistas allowing 'anarcho-anarchist' students to attend their teach-ins at UNAM.

Speaking of Zapatistas...

You know, I love to travel, meet new people and see interesting ancient sights. Who doesn't? But I had little sympathy for those whiny old ofay tourists in San Cristobal de las Casas back on the 1st of January 1994, who could not travel to the Mayan ruins. Wah-wah-wah. Cry-babies!

Hmmm. I was going to say, "I am sure you all remember that day." But sometimes I forget how really ancient I am. A bunch of you probably weren't even born yet on January 1, 1994. Yikes. Anyway, that was the day that both Stalinism and Global Capital received a shot across the bow from deep within the Lacandon Jungle, which is in Oaxaca, in southern Mexico.

You could maybe even say it was "the shot heard 'round of the world" of our modern age. Who'd've thunk the World Spirit woulda rode in with a masked man on a horse, smoking a pipe? Yeah, this 'modern' world is a funny place.






Anyway. Those turistas in Oaxaca back in '94 did get a decent apology, at least, when Subcomandante Marcos reportedly said to them: “I’m sorry. This is a revolution”.



As for those impatient anarchists out there who've been throwing bricks and breaking windows and whatnot over the past few years: We should not blame them for their shortcomings, nor hold them responsible for the mistakes of the Left, nor for the inability of the managers of global capital to 'fix' their own world-crisis. And we certainly shouldn't persecute them just for being who they are.

Oh. And, lest I forget to mention it: what goes for the real world goes here too. Distinctions between this world and that one are hooey when you get right down to it. Neither the "real" nor the "game" worlds are "real" in any fundamentally "real" sense. (Of course you already knew that. Duh!)



So. Yeah. Anyway. On the question of allowing rowdy, smelly anarchists to participate in the game world... what I'd like to recommend is an eRep anarchist fanzine, actually, sponsored by some nice, respectable group of revolutionaries, like, say, the Socialist Freedom Party. (Woot-woot! Join today! Let me know you've joined and I will send you lotsa free stuff! I mean -- err, umm -- staunch rrrr-r-r-r-r-revolutionaries only need apply! )


Along with all the SFP's feel-good socialist-freedom wonderment, you know, there should be a place alongside that where every anar-kid in eRepublik can contribute one page worth of text stating their point of view on the New World.

It could be one word written really, really large, like: "LIARS!!" or "BOOOOOORING!!". Or maybe something longer and more thought provoking stuff like: "Real change first appears in the police blotter." Or: "I shit on the thought police."

Or perhaps a studious anarcha-sister or -brother would deconstruct for us Miguel Amorós' analysis on the "slum riots" in Paris in 2005 and how that relates to eRepublik? That would be wicked cool.




Musical interlude: Nique la France!











Thesis: eRepublik is like a cracked sidewalk
==================================================

The 'screams', or in my case on more than one occasion the 'farts', engendered when playing eRepublik are, obviously, a gut rejection to its banal capitalist gamesmanship.

Very, very disappointingly, the Dealer engages in bad sportsmanship to make a buck. It's true. And we feel that. But our screaming, farting reactions to this are, at a philosophical level, also (mutatis mutandis) a visceral rejection -- sometimes conscious, sometimes not -- of global capital in its entirety.

To squeeze this out psychologically-speaking, once can observe that the angst (or gas) that builds up when playing the game as it is is perhaps a concrete specification of the practices that will take us (inexorably?) from the old New World to the new New World.


By the way...

Let's just go ahead and throw out the virtual window any tired old Marxist (and e-Marxist) assumptions that one 'system' can be replaced with another 'system'. Or that there will be a 'revolution', as that term was cheerfully bandied about prior to 1994, and echoed much too often afterwards, including here in the New World.

The millenarian (and largely, but not entirely christological) mythologizing that the new will be qualitatively different from the old, so popular with those enthusiastic modern generations between 1848 and 1994, is a dead letter. Let it go. Get on with it.




The fact is that the seeds of the New New World are already flourishing. They are taking root and growing in the cracks of eRepublik in the here and now.

This kind of 'cracking' is the only way that change can come about -- through the old New World being superseded by elements that express changes that already exist in nascent and perhaps unrecognized forms.

The system is already badly 'cracked'. It is now more vulnerable, more fragile, and increasingly susceptible to all sorts of potent 'other doings'. The interstices are growing. The opportunities for 'experiments' in non-capitalist living are increasing. Our chance is there for the taking if we choose to recognize and build on the fact that so much of what we do is in fact already 'anti-capitalist'.







Anti-Thesis: the Gift Economy hasn't swept away the Old e-world yet
==================================================================

Heh! Had you going there, didn't I?



Yeah. Pollyanna is the crack cocaine of the revolutionaries.

It's true that a healthy impulse against alienation and towards antagonism against a killer culture is always there. We still hate the boss and the tyrant, no matter how slippery, no matter how 'modern'. We know that.

But the question is whether our 'other doings' -- like the subterranean gift economy of eRepublik where all actual community and friendship resides, or the inter-continental 'flow' of citizens and party members that make the game so interesting at a human level even if we cannot afford to 'travel' to those places and 'be' in those parties in real life, and the recurring diplomatic agreements to keep 'playing' rather than allow for a (literally) dead-end 'winner take all' conclusion to emerge -- the question is whether these things -- and their real-world counterparts -- like Mondragon cooperatives, Zapatista uprisings, loverly free choirs and social centers, or choosing to lounge about with friends rather than work overtime -- are not potentially forms of acceptance, accommodation or conciliation, rather than streams that might link up in some way to become a single force big enough to actually undo the Deal.

Well. Let's at least agree to agree that such crack-openings within the standard paradigms of consensus reality are 'experiments', yes?




We goof off, we e-riot, we give gifts, and so on.

But we do not and cannot know when we undertake them whether they will succeed in actaully cracking open eRepublik, that is, whether they will persist and 'go beyond' themselves.

But we do them anyway. For their own sake. For the service of our needs and wants.

It's good that the struggle to create a new New World of eRepublik (and correspondingly, to overthrow global capital and its evil twin brother the doddering and strangulating hungry ghost-zombies of Stalinism) doesn't have to involve self-denial, self-flagellation, years of psycho-analysis or other types of psycho-drama.

That's the beauty and job of the theory of 'cracks'. You don't have to be a shit-head to be a revolutionary. You can enjoy it.


But. But. But isn't there also a niggling troubling sensation when we imagine a theory that seems to suggest that all these 'other doings' are equal?

While it is possible that communal allotments of weapons and food, or fast-tracks for newbies will contribute to fundamental change, we still need some kind of room in this theory for distinguishing between which 'other things' have potential to make some positive contribution as real game-changers, and which are just fun.



How do we reconcile that without just solipsistically spewing out a bunch opinions on the Internet, which will take whatever electrons we barf up on to it?

One way would be to compare those 'moments' against actual historical events where 'utopia' sprang forth spontaneously and on a mass scale, if only for a while...




Synthesis: Utopia can emerge in the midst of Disaster
==================================================================




The tragedies that have ensued from the kind of 'every man for himself' panic that occurs in over-crowded conditions, especially when there are blocked exits, are well-recorded. The meta-narrative around such events tends to reinforce Hobbesian stereotypes that suggest human(istic) behavior only exists due to an effort of will by State Authority to cage a Lord of the Flies world of barbarity and instinctual baseness.

Indeed, that is also the central mimetic conceit of eRepublik's fantasy world.

The nature of human response to disaster is deeply political. The fear of mass panic, the supposed 'mob rampages' and need to tame 'looting' typically have served as rationales to increase central control through state laws and state violence.



And yet. The historical record shows some else.



After Katrina, for example, it was police and vigilantes who were shooting at the working class on the street and sabotaging the absolutely mass-scale mutual aid that was taking place. The story of the communitarian response to the Katrina disaster remains largely untold exactly because the role of the state in it was (and is) so shameful.

Anybody who has been through kind of thing will tell you the same thing. It is the state that 'panics' at the self-organizing mass following earthquakes, hurricanes, typhoons, and tsunamis. Disasters don't divide but in fact unite many of those affected. Such community, at such intense levels, is typically missing from everyday life. It is not uncommon to hear people talk about such times with a bit of wonderment in their voices.

A similar thing happened in China not too long ago. The peoples' response to the 2008 Sichuan quake, which killed 70,000, led to a corresponding social disruption as it became evident that the central authorities and corrupt managers had created an infrastructure and a response system unfit for human needs. The ripples of that event are still unfolding, as is the social aftermath of Katrina.





In Britain during the Second World War, the 'Blitz spirit' referred to the shared plight of neighbors who barely knew each other speaking for the first time and finding strength in each others' company, and in their collectivity, as the bombs fell. Despite its rhetorical usefulness as a nationalistic marketing scheme, such a term also has a real element of human truth: it is one of those 'other things' which demonstrates that so-called 'everyday life' is the real disaster.

Disastrous events tend to sweep away everyday concerns and differences, bringing into being a sense of connectedness and sociality that we feel deprived of in 'ordinary' times.
















Negation of the Negation: Cracks and disaster responses -- is it enough?
==========================================================================

Since the onslaughts of Thatcherism and Reaganism in the 70's and 80's, average wages adjusted for inflation have continued to drop for the vast majority, despite all the nifty new technology.


Despite the signs of new life on the Left emerging from Central America over the past decade or so, the rotting corpse of Stalinism continues to stink up the legacy of social-democracy all over the world.


eRepublik just seems to get worse and worse with each 'improvement'.


Sigh... Global capital is a wily and slippery opponent indeed, isn't it?




Is finding 'uncapitalist' moments -- and seeing that as what we once called 'the revolution' -- is that enough? Is that the best we can hope for?


Does contemplating the carnival of goodwill and humanity that inevitably emerges in the midst of disasters give us a glimpse of a real, working possibility for a better world? Some fine critics of capital throw a damper on that as well, arguing with good reason that global capital is slippery enough to use such disasters to strategically restructure itself. (As, for example, the USA's lords of capital did, quite successfully, in the wake of the Blitz).


And in any case, the length of time that such disaster-induced mutual aid 'utopias' are able to remain in existence is never a given.

After the devastating 1905 earthquake in San Francisco, citizens spontaneously set up free cafes, kitchens and social gathering spaces for each other. Sarah Bernhardt organized a free performance of Phedre for more than 5,000 survivors of the quake.





All lovely, yeah. And quite interesting. And perhaps worthy of consideration when we are pondering how to use the cracks in eRepublik for the benefit of all humanity.



But will either 'free moments' or temporary outbreaks of utopian behavior in the wake of disasters be enough so that the Subcomandante and his pals can go on and get down off their horses?



Jury is out on that, I'd say.










Thanks for reading,
xoxoxoxoxox,
PQ