That is what we are. Good only for inhabiting the caverns of dreams and metaphysics, unworthy of setting foot in the palaces of concreteness and practicality. We draw out our existence at least a millennium late. We don’t know how to get in line with the times; we don’t strive to come into tune with the present; we insist upon doing untimely things of little convenience to ourselves.
Continue reading Troglodytes (2000) →

AND YOU CALL THIS LIVING?

Rising at dawn. Quickly going off to work, using some fast means of locomotion; in other words, getting locked up in a more or less spacious place, usually lacking air. Seated in front of a computer, typing without rest in order to transcribe letters, half of which wouldn’t even get written if you had to do it by hand. Or operating some mechanical device, manufacturing objects that are always identical. Or never moving more than a few steps away from an engine whose motion needs to be ensured or whose functioning needs to be monitored. Or, finally, standing in front of a loom continuously repeating the same gestures, the same movements, mechanically, automatically. And this for hours and hours without changing, without taking any recreation, without a change of atmosphere. Every day!
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The revolutionary is the ultimate illegalist. The person whose actions always conform to the law will be, in the best of circumstances, a well-domesticated beast, never a revolutionary.

Law conserves; revolution regenerates.

If one wants change, it is thus necessary to start by breaking the law.

To claim that revolution can be made while respecting the law is an aberration, a contradiction. The law is a yoke and anyone who wants to be free has to break it.

Anyone who deceives the workers with the emancipation of the proletariat through legal means is a swindler, since the law forbids snatching wealth from the hands of the masters that robbed us. Their expropriation to the benefit of all is the essential condition for the emancipation of humanity.

The law is a brake and we don’t free ourselves with brakes.

Every freedom that humanity has conquered has been the work of illegalists who have mastered laws in order to smash them to bits.

Tyrants die, stabbed, and no article of the legal code could have gotten rid of them.

Expropriation can only come about by breaking the law, certainly not by submitting to it.

This is the real reason why if we want to be revolutionaries, we have to be illegalists. It is necessary to get off the beaten paths and open new paths to transgression.

Rebellion and legality are irreconcilable. Leave law and order to conservatives and hucksters.

from Machete #1