Monday, February 7, 2011

The Myth of the Network


Think back to when you were young. Perhaps you are still young. But try to remember the feeling you got when you first became interested in and began to explore radical (anti)politics. Think of that naive belief you may have had that there was a teeming revolutionary movement right around the corner, that all you had to do was run out and join it and someone would put a rifle in your hands and you would spend your days playing cards at the barricades beneath red and black flags. Remember seeing images of the Black Panther Party for the first time, their disciplined movements and strikingly similar dress filling you with nostalgia for a time you probably never knew. Remember seeing videos of the Zapatistas, scores of rebel soldiers in ski masks drilling with their bayonets in exercises that probably had as much to do with cultivating a romantic image in the media as with any readiness for combat. And that image made your heart swell.

Myth is humanity's attempt to explain that which cannot be explained. Those things which to us appear so incomprehensible as to blur the threshold between our everyday lives and some greater, unexplored dimension become mythologized in the hopes that we might preserve an essential spark of what it was to have felt it. Myths are what we turn to when trying to describe something so complex, so ultimately sensory, that no rational formula would have been able to account for it.

And what is the yearning for liberation and the will to destroy all that which impedes it if not sensory, rather than rational? Why is there is no standing revolutionary army for us to join, when that essential impetus towards it seems so ingrained? At some point we become aware of the different factions and rival ideologies within the so-called revolutionary movement, and we either transform into a close-minded partisan of one idea above all others or simply turn so jaded as to no longer hold out any belief in the value of our actions as individuals.

But before that pitiful climax, prior to the dull routines that so many of us see ourselves falling into, there is still that initial catharsis where - if even for a brief moment - we just "get it": all of us who see in our lives the potential for a break from all politics and economic slavery are essentially compatible in those core beliefs, and it is only a false separation bred of the rational mind that keeps us disconnected from the raw power of our collective myth.

The Red & Anarchist Action Network is nothing if not the conscious manifestation of that myth. Our ideology need not be internally coherent, and some would believe us to have broken the very laws of physics simply by our continued existence. But these things do not matter to us, our membership having been entirely composed of those who simply "get it". RAAN is that revolutionary army you've been looking for, and all that remains is for you to treat it as such. Look into yourself and envision what that army would feel like, how raw and visible its presence would be, how audacious its very existence and how confident its movements as it decolonized every space it came into contact with. No more half measures, no more aborted attempts, and certainly no more convoluted processes by which those who will never "get it" might try to create the revolutionary army. It already exists, in myth and image yet real nonetheless, and it waiting for you to imagine yourself a part of it.