After the end of history
Photo: Ario_J at flickr, CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic
In 1999, we were situated differently than many US activists involved in the ‘counter-globalisation’ movement. While some of our comrades focused on injustice overseas, our point of departure was the alienation of our daily lives as workers or lumpenbourgeois. This gave our revolt a certain immediacy, but it also meant we started with little long-term vision or global perspective. We set out to discredit the myth of bourgeois happiness and contentment that kept both workers and managers on their treadmills. This may have been a sound strategy in the 1990s, but we were unprepared when the exaggerated placidity of the ruling order was ruptured by a series of disasters and ‘the end of history’ began to look more like the end of the world. We had banked on stasis as an essential aspect of domination, not predicting that domination could also be perpetuated through crisis.
A CrimethInc. ex-Worker. CrimethInc. ex-Workers’ Collective is a decentralised anarchist collective composed of many cells which act independently in pursuit of a freer and more joyous world. www.crimethinc.com
This article is part of the t-10 series from Issue 5 of Turbulence asking, ‘What were you wrong about 10 years ago?‘.
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Turbulence is a journal/newspaper that we hope will become an ongoing space in which to think through, debate and articulate the political, social, economic and cultural theories of our movements, as well as the networks of diverse practices and alternatives that surround them. Read more here
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