THE BLACK COLOR OF OIL

2002 will have been the year of oil.

Starting from Galicia where the costs are wrapped up in “chapapote” (mixture of oil, seaweed and other things) and the consciousness in demand that reinforces the system of dependence on industrial technology. “Nunca mais” (Never more) is the name of the platform of demands of some neo-statists. It has never been more distant from a way out of industrial society.

Passing through the Algerian desert, from which has come out, along with black gold, the support of western governments for the brutal military bureaucracy, as well as the docility of the intellectuals and the press, quick to slander the Kabylian revolt or, more effectively, to bury it under the clamor of the celebrations for what France has described as “the year of Algeria” and the visit of president Chirac to Algeria.

Continuing through Porto Marghera, where there is “the smoke”, just as long as there is every type of disease, “and the rage” unfortunately is missing, that of rebelling against an activity that produces not only health risks, but also an entire world hostile to the worker her/himself: will one ever be able to eat the spaghetti with mussels in peace and their dioxin rate twenty times higher (rates gathered in the lake of Venice) than that recommended by the OMS?

Our journey ends in Italy, between the garbage basket and the images of the war in Iraq. Because if modern war is so paralyzing, with the end of distinctions between military and civilians, and even between enemies and allies (victims of the war of ’91 were not least of all American soldiers, that have become guinea pigs in an exemplary epidemiological study entitled “Gulf war syndrome”) and with its mass slaughters, there is one single reason: it rests on a modern industry of nuclear and chemical armaments.

War is fed by industrial society in a vicious circle: modern war is the fruit of industrial technology, which grows through the inventions in times of war: there is no nuclear industry without Hiroshima; there is no Internet without the Pentagon.

But this circle depends in its turn on the tacit consent of the modern citizen and of its immense irresponsibility: its filth is full of plastic plates. It is therefore useless and harmful to dissociate the war in Iraq from our way of life. Otherwise, the “no” to war would serve to justify a peace that is another war, the one declared two centuries ago against the human being by industry, that is winning thanks to cancer, the violence of wage labor, ecological disaster, new alienations, up to the final victory: the total adaptation of the human being to its products.

This is why anyone who denounces “the oil war” without denouncing the large consumption of oil, and the social organization the makes it necessary, has the corpse of a victim of a road accident in his mouth; whoever does it without denouncing the economic and political calamity that fatally supposes the discovery of oil (like any other raw material of exportation) in any land, has the corpse of a Kabyle rebel (or a Columbian cocalero…); anyone who does it without denouncing the high harmfulness of oil, has the tumor of a vinyl worker.

As for ourselves, we have no need for all of this in order to have the desire to vomit: the disgust for survival imposed by the current system is enough for us. And in order to denounce the war, we denounce that which produces it, inspiring us to the struggles that the luddites undertook two centuries ago, because they saw the dangers of technological progress and acted in consequence.

We must show the true face of mercantile democracy: the repression of contestation under the circus of opposition, the daily violence under psycho-pharmaceutical well-being, misery under economic efficacy.