anhilaal

Daily Life & Hiroshima

– Some Notes

retrieved from Return Fire vol.1

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[ed. - Released by anhilaal, of the Coalition Against Work and Civilization: South Asia. From an invitation to a two-day gathering in Puri, India, October 2012: “Civilization is the history of turning more and more human activities into work[...] What else is the impersonal, organized power and violence other than impersonal, organized control over our work and its products? We are against all work-pyramids operating in the name of countries, parties, families and identities. We are for self-determined human activities which are not possible without abolition of our existence as wage-workers or serfs.”]

1. “Everyday almost the same routine: go to bed around 24 hrs; go to work and come back home around 20 hrs; have dinner and read a little and go to bed again. Well anyway I'm glad to have at least something to do. I am doing this job not only for the sake of earning money as you know. Let's hope for the best: for being able to do something more useful for myself like studying some nice books and try to write something about the current international affairs.”

A page from our normal daily life devoted to un-charismatic struggles to keep our head above water.

2. Bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed 100,000 within seconds.

3. The scale of killings betrays only the extent of state formation. Conversely, claims of organizing its prevention betrays the extent of the same. An elementary question: how do they mobilise so much financial, ideological and human resources to carry them out?

4. One of the questions we might ask, to start with, is: how high was the per capita income in America on the eve of war? Or per capita domestic rate of saving? Or how big was the size of the credit-bubble? Everything boils down to the endless control over the reservoir of labour of contemporary and future generations through indirect and direct taxes and profits. To be precise, crumbs that we get back as salary, wages and benefits are only a fraction of all that is taken away from us and turned against us. In other words, immense funds mobilised for national unity/security and/or development are unthinkable without our daily normal lives.

5. Our eventless drab, normal life is the other side of spectacular killings: organised by states or proto-states in the name of god, people and workers.

6. Our drab daily struggle to keep hunger at bay might take place without such killings. But such spectacular killings will not take place without our drab daily struggles.

7. Every time we shout “Hiroshima or Auschwitz never again!” and we put our magnifying glass at the root of world-history to uncover the reasons 'that gave birth to such tragedies', we end up preparing for the last or lost battles.

8. The roots of extraordinary events are not lost in an unbreakable chain of extraordinary events, personalities and thoughts. The roots of the spectacular events are in our 'non-spectacular', normal, daily lives.

8.a. The roots are, to be precise, between our hands and the plough, our hands and the assembly-line, fingers and the keyboard and trigger and the index-finger. Empires emerge and vanish into thin air because of the type of relationship that exists between us and our instrument of work. In this the biggest violence that we do unto ourselves is the root of all violences.

9. So long as large swathe of populations is engaged in existential combat i.e. tied down to and reproducing itself mainly for work, the final non-recurrence of spectacular killings can never be guaranteed.

10. It is only the freedom from this chain called ordinary, daily life determined by needs of outpumping work-pyramids i. e. the Chief and the subordinates of the thieves of our lifetime, for example competing states, firms, families, identities and managements; that will free us from the recurrence of extraordinary human tragedies.