first published here: http://mbembhele.tumblr.com/

keep reading here: http://www.icp.org/perspective/the-smartphone-camera-and-the-material-politics-of-visibility

first published here: http://witsvuvuzela.com/2015/08/21/pamberi-ne-chimurenga-forward-with-the-revolution/

Guy Debord (1931-­1994) was the most influential figure in the
Situationist International, the notorious subversive group that played
a key role in provoking the May 1968 revolt in France. “The Society of
the Spectacle” (1973, 90 minutes) is Debord’s film adaptation of his
own 1967 book of the same name. As passages from the book are read
in voiceover the text is illuminated, via direct illustration or various
types of ironic contrast, by clips from Russian and Hollywood features
(“Potemkin,” “Ten Days That Shook the World,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls,”
“Shanghai Gesture,” “Johnny Guitar,” “Mr. Arkadin,” etc.), TV commercials,
softcore porn, and news and documentary footage, including glimpses of
Spain 1936, Hungary ’56, Watts ’65, France ’68, and other revolts of the
past. Inter-title quotes from Marx, Machiavelli, Clausewitz, Tocqueville,
and Debord himself occasionally break the flow, challenging the viewers
to question their own relation to the film — and to the society as a whole.

San Francisco filmmaker Konrad Steiner has produced a dubbed version
of this film using Ken Knabb’s English translation as read by artist/scholar
Dore Bowen. Konrad also located and reinserted the original English-language
clips from the many quoted films (which in Debord’s film were mostly dubbed
in French). This enables English-speaking viewers to pay full attention to
the images instead of trying to follow subtitles, and thus better perceive the
complex interplay between montage, image, and language through which
Debord presents his theses.

This excellent dubbed version is now online at https://vimeo.com/139772287

(English overdub) The Society of the Spectacle (Final sound edit) from konrad steiner on Vimeo.

For more information on Debord’s films, see http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord.films/index.htm

Let it be established: it has been documented that you can’t simply shoot into a crowd here, that the protest by intellectuals against the mass stupefaction by the Springer media is serious, that it is not meant for the dear Lord and not for later, in order to be able to say at some point that you were always against it. It has been documented that common decency is a shackle that can be broken through if those wearing the shackles are beaten and shot at. It has been documented that there are still people in this country who do not merely condemn terror and violence and [who] are secretly opposed to it and sometimes take a risk and open their mouths and do not let themselves be frightened; and there are also people who are willing and able to resist so it can be understood that business cannot continue as usual. It has been shown that incitement to murder and murder disturb the public peace and order, that there is a public that will not accept that. That a human life has a different quality than windowpanes, Springer trucks, and demonstrators’ cars, which were overturned and damaged by police in absolutely arbitrary acts during the delivery blockade in front of the Springer tower. That there is a public determined not merely to call the intolerable intolerable, but to intervene to disarm Springer and his accomplices.

Now, after it has been shown that there are means other than just demonstrations, Springer hearings, and protest events, means other than those that have failed, because the attack on Rudi Dutschke could not be prevented; now that the shackles of common decency have been broken, the discussion on violence and counterviolence can and must be started anew. Counterviolence as it has been practiced during these Easter days is neither suitable to arouse sympathy, nor to draw startled liberals over to the side of the extra-parliamentary opposition (APO). Counterviolence risks turning into violence, where the brutality of the police determines the law of action, where superior rationality gives way to powerless rage, where paramilitary actions of the police are answered through paramilitary means. The Establishment, however, the “gentlemen at the top” – to use Rudi’s words – in the parties, governments, and associations have to comprehend that there is only one means by which to create lasting “peace and order,” namely, by expropriating Springer. The fun is over. “Protest is when I say I don’t like this and that. Resistance is when I see to it that things that I don’t like no longer occur.”

Source: Ulrike Marie Meinhof, “Vom Protest zum Widerstand” [“From Protest to Resistance”], konkret, no. 5 (May 1968), p. 5.

At 4 o’clock in the morning of Thursday 22 October a friend and I heeded an urgent call on tweeter by a 19 year old young lady whose call gained steady momentum throughout the early hours of the morning. She wanted to know when is ‪#‎UJShutDown‬ starting.

Let me tell u about Anele Madonsela, a KZN born student from Umlazi, studying (BA) Philosophy. She is a daughter of a lawyer and policeman who ironically was involved in the violent crowd controlling of students at ‪#‎UKZNFeesMustFall‬.

You see Anele is a non-politically aligned student who took it upon herself to mobilise for the #UJShutDown because the SASCO lead SRC was miss-representing students, intimidating them not to join forces with the now national #FeesMustFall campaign.

When the complaisant SRC realized they were not on the right side of history, they sent a signal to management which tacitly said if those agitating for the ‪#‎UJShutDownon‬ should be arrested because the Student Representive Council had not sanctioned the demonstration and if suspension and explusion is their fate, so be it.
Where they said it verbally or in writing or by body language, that is the message management read. The revolution was being sabotaged

Fortunately Anele stood firm and continued tweeting till there were twenty students at sunrise. Like those heroines at Wits and elsewhere, she did not retreat. Soon there was a group of hundred students; by noon her tweets had mobilized more than a couple thousand students.

The reactionary DASO was wrapped in its ‘diplomatic’ ropes with management on the issue of fees so much so that that they distanced themselves from the planned #UJShutDown campaign. The EFF had an identity problem at the beginning not knowing whether to be visible or not. Even though the EFF CIC had tweeted in solidarity with #UJShutDown.

This hesitation from student organizations at UJ meant Anele had to lead the revolution, the best she could without any assistance from those who were elected and supposed to be united at the forefront, as we had witnessed the progressive show of unity and strength at Wits, UCT and elsewhere.

Theoretically in my head then it was difficult to believe the shutdown protesters would heed numbers. Alas I was forgetting one fundamental practical defining element of the student protests spirit; it is a campaign by the students, with the students and for the student. Therefore it was bound to be organic and spontaneous. Sometimes political loyalties need to be put on hold for maximum unity and solidarity of all students, and for all South African youth struggles for economic freedom.

We were the first victims of bullying, intimidation and human rights violation by the outsourced security on the employ of UJ Vice Chancellor Iron Ransburg. We did not lose spirit because we knew it was up to us to stand up for our principles and not retreat. We stood firm on the idea and hope that what we were doing was far bigger than a handful of us. We saw the revolution as an honour to Solomon Mahlangu and Hector Peterson who called for unity even at the hour of oppression. It was also a show of respect to the 1944 generation of the young lions of Mandela and Sisulu who disrupted the conservative thinking which slowed down the revolution. We were hearing the voices of Lembede, Fanon and Biko saying, it is time we struggled for the realization of our generational mission – to achieve economic freedom.

We have a common cause and it must succeed, through unity and discipline. Even if we don’t achieve free education today, future generations will benefit for the efforts of the current generation.

With all these voices finding in my minds, we had no choice but to force our way through security and locked gates.

We were committed to the struggle which in its entirety is about asserting the realities and perils of financial oppression and injustice by those hiding the keys to the gates of opportunity for black youth. If our SRC could not lead us, those already leading in other compases were our leaders. We wanted to join them. Cynical commentators call us copycats. If the cats copy others to fight for freedom, what’s wrong with that? Why delegitimize their action?

The UJ SRC tried with all its might to delegitimize the #UJShutDown campaign, supported by its management friends who had concluded from their air-conditioned offices that student leaders calling and mobilizing for protests had ill motives and tarnishing the university’s image. One central SRC presidential candidate screamed frustratingly at a small group of 10 students and parents gathered outside the university at 7:00am and said that ‘UJ did not need to march for fees’.

Finally we realized there is truth to Judith February’s speculation that there is much political opportunism within some students in regards to these marches, see article “Op-Ed: why is state not a target of student protest” (Daily Maverick: 20 October 2015).

Some students might have suffered disillusionment earlier this year at UCT ‪#‎RhodesMustFall‬ however after our experience this Thursday, we are strengthened by the amount of support and awareness displayed across the country that intimidation and white arrogance will not and has not fazed the black student. Maybe I feel this way because as noisy as they may be, these white supremacists have become a minority. They have missed the diversity of the #FeesMustFall campaign. No wonder one Tukkies white student had a poster written “Don’t Tell My Mom I Think She’s Racist”. Google it!

As we were leaving UJ the reality of the racialisation of the South African situation became evident.

There were white drivers insulting us. That is why we sometimes question their commitment to national unity and economic freedom for all. Far too often inside and outside the gates of UJ delegitimize our efforts. It has been more and more evident this year and more recently in the past two weeks from social media and on the ground. I lost count of the many times white women were insisting on driving in an entrance we had ##UJShutDown. Somehow white arrogance permeated more in white women at my campus on Thursday, a superiority complex and entitlement that far exceeds the necessity in any context.

In the past two weeks I have not unfriended any ignorant white ‘friend’ off any of my social media. This is because I am no longer afraid to assert my existence and my being by means of teaching, I comment and I share knowledge. Gone are the days when I read a status replete with racial prejudice and ignorance and I shyly skip the status or worse; unfriend, no! Now I ‘school’ them.

This is because I hope they will use the white arrogance to actually read a useful book, to question themselves and not always reproduce their boring warn-out platitudes. I saw many of these in online comments pages of newspapers. Check IoL. Check Daily Maverick, check Mail and Guardian – they are not even reading their own children’s messages as they show solidarity with the protesting students. Well, they even formed human chains in CT. Here at Auckland Park, they were determined to bully us.

But through education and experience we know too well that ‘Whiteness is a theatre, a performance of exclusion’ as Aryan Kaganof answered when asked about his film “Decolon i sing Wits – an act of epistemic disobedience”.

Inconcur with him, they have called police for students, they have driven over students, they have hurled slurs at students they have written in hopes to delegitimize the struggle for free education. But still they failed.

Anele Madonsela’s courage and leadership prowess will forever be etched on my consciousness. History books might not remember her the same way they will write about Mcebo Dlamini but make no mistake, those who marched side by side with her as UJ finally awakened and joined the struggle, will forever be humbled and inspired by her steadfastness in time of crisis. ‪#‎Young_lead_2015‬
‪#‎fessmustfall‬
‪#‎UJhutdown‬

Speech by Pastor Xola Skosana at the Mass Meeting marking the removal of the Rhodes statue from UC
April 10, 2015

If we and our children cannot see ourselves in the architectural design around us, then we subconsciously remain visitors to the only corner of the world God gave us.

Europe, we visit, Africa we live in. We must never underestimate the psychological effect of foreign occupation, the occupiers seal their conquest with their language, signage, images, statues, art, all of which is the deliberate ongoing miseducation of us the conquered and the obscuring of our memory and identity.

Food on the table of a people who have lost their land, identity, culture language, etc, will not answer their deepest quest and deepest longings for freedom. . To equate Black pain with poverty or lack of food is to reduce Black people to an animalistic existence of eating defecating and dying

One of the lessons we have learnt over the last few weeks is that a revolution is unpredictable, it may lie dormant for the longest time and erupt when it is least expected. We have also learnt through the courage of students here at this university that ivory towers and corridors of white power are not untouchable. The heroic act of Chumani Maxwele which sparked a tidal wave of solidarity from UCT to Oxford University, from Rhodes University to Colombia University, this act has helped demystify colonial enclaves of white dominance.

All disguises of white power and the preservation of white privilege must fall

Black people all over the world are emboldened by what the students have been able to accomplish here and and we are assured once again that black pain will not be left to fester indefinitely, freedom for black people will not be postponed forever

Black pain, whether in those rat infested hellholes we call townships or in academia, all its many dimensions and manifestations, it is a direct consequence of persistent white power. There can be no healing of black pain without the dismantling of white power

This victory is for Chantel Hoffmann, who was called a Kaffir and shocked with a Taser device in Harfield Village, on the 3rd of January 2015 by the 22 year old TALANA Jo HUYSAMER

This victory is for the 52 year old Manenberg cleaner, Delia Adonis, brutally attacked and racially assaulted by five white boys – 19 year old Chad de Matos, 19 old Aaron Mack, and 20 year old Mitchell Turner, in front of her son in Claremont, on the 17th of October 2014

This victory is for the 44 year old Cynthia Joni, the domestic worker who was attacked by Tim Osrin

This Victory is for the 22 year old Muhammed Makungwa, sjambokked by Jan Van Tonder in Claremont while on his way to work simply because he is black and therefore a criminal

Well, there are those who say we are exaggerating our pain, they say so because we have not yet told the story of black pain in an uncensored way

TODAY WITH THE FALLING OF RHODES, WE ARE TELLING OUR STORY AND REVEALING OUR SCARS

WE MUST RAISE OUR VOICE AND TELL OUR STORY

LEST THE WORLD FORGET ABOUT US

LEST WE BE BURIED IN THE HISTORY BOOKS WE DID NOT WRITE

OURS IS A STORY OF RESILIENCE

OURS IS A STORY OF HOPE AND DESPAIR

OURS IS A STORY OF FAITH FOOLISHNESS AND SUPERSTITION

OURS IS A STORY OF BELIEF AND DISBELIEF

OURS IS A STORY OF LIFE AND DEATH

THE WORLD MUST KNOW HOW WE HAVE SURVIVED YEARS OF SERVITUDE

THE WORLD MUST KNOW HOW WE REMAIN SCARRED BY THE WHITE POWER STRUCTURE AND THE PRESERVATION OF WHITE PRIVILEGE

OUR ENTIRE EXISTENCE HAS BEEN ALTERED IN WAYS WORDS CANNOT TELL

WE HAVE A MESSAGE, WE HAVE A STORY TO TELL

IT IS OUR STORY

WE MUST BE THE ONES WHO TELL IT

TELL THOSE WHO COLLECT STORIES BY THEIR BIG BANK ROLLED CAMERAS THAT THIS IS OUR STORY

HELP ME PREACH NOW, ” SAY OUR STORY”

TELL THE EDITOR IN THE NEWS ROOM, THIS IS OUR STORY

TELL THE WRITER WITH AN iPAD IN HIS HAND THIS IS OUR STORY

TELL THE TOURIST WITH A SONY DIGITAL CAMERA, THIS IS OUR STORY

TELL THE JOURNALIST WITH THE DEADLINE TO MEET, THIS IS OUR STORY

TELL THE PUBLISHER AND THE NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER, THIS IS OUR STORY

TELL ALL OF THEM, TELL THEM THAT THEY ARE THIEVES, THAT THEY HAVE STOLEN OUR STORY OF PAIN

TELL THEM THEIR CAMERA LANCE HAS OBSCURED OUR STORY

TELL THEM THEIR PEN HAS WATERED DOWN OUR PAIN

TELL THEM THEIR FILM MAKER AND ARTIST HAVE MOCKED AND TRIVIALIZED OURSTORY

BUT OUR COLLECTIVE VOICE IS RETURNING

OUR COLLECTIVE MEMORY IS COMING BACK

OUR COLLECTIVE FAITH IS STRONGER NOW

OUR COLLECTIVE HOPE IS HIGHER

OUR COLLECTIVE SCARS ARE HEALING

THIS IS OUR STORY

WE WILL TELL IT AS IT IS

AND WE WILL WRITE IT AS WE LIKE

HELP ME PREACH PEOPLE

OUR SERMONS WILL TELL OUR STORY

OUR SONGS WILL TELL OUR STORY

OUR DANCE AND OUR RYTHEM WILL TELL OUR STORY

THE SCARS OF OUR OWN FLESH WILL TELL OUR STORY

OUR TEARS WILL TELL OUR STORY

OUR ARCHITECTURE WILL TELL OUR STORY

SIGNAGE WILL TELL OUR STORY

PUBLIC IMAGES WILL TELL OUR STORY

OUR STATUES WILL TELL OUR STORY

YES WE ARE SURVIVORS OF A BRUTAL SYSTEM (black pain)

WE ARE REMNANTS THAT ARE LEFT BEHIND

SONS AND DAUGHTER WHO COME FROM A RAPTURED WOMB

WE SUCKLED THE BREAST AND DRANK THE MILK OF MALNOURISHMENT (BLACK PAIN)

THROUGH NEVIRAPINE , WE NARROWLY ESCAPED HIV INFECTION

THOSE OF US WHI DID NOT, LIVE TODAY WITH COURAGE AND FORTITUDE

WE DARE TO DREAM THOUGH WE ARE LIMPING

WE SURVIVED OVERCROWDED CLASSROOMS FULL OF INFECTIOUS AND CONTAGIOUS DECEASES

WE SURVIVED DR DEATH BASSON’ S BIOLOGICAL WARFARE OF GENOCIDAL PROPORTIONS.

WE LIVED THROUGH A POLICE STATE OF EMERGENCY

ON OUR WAY TO SCHOOL, WE JUMPED OVER CHARRED BODIES OF BLACK PEOPLE NECKLACED FOR SELLING THEIR SOUL

BEFORE WE SAT IN THE CLASS AND FED FROM BANTU EDUCATION, WE STARED AT BADLY BEATEN BODIES OF SUSPECTED INFORMERS

ON SATURDAYS WE BURIED BODIES OF THE INNOCENT, MISTAKEN FOR THE ENEMY

IN CHURCH HALLS, WE MOURNED CHILDREN WHO DIED IN A HAIL OF BULLETS BY AN UNSYMPATHETIC POLICE FORCE

IN BEER HALLS OUR FATHERS DRANK THEMSELVES INTO A STUPOR, TEMPORARILY NUMBING THEMSELVES FROM THE PAIN OF BEING A BOY/MAN. A BOY BY DAY AND A MAN BY NIGHT

WE ARE SURVIVORS OF THOSE CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE OF BLACK ON BLACK VIOLENCE

THIS IS OUR STORY

WE HAVE FOUGHT AND LOST MANY BATTES

WE HAVE RUN THE RACE AND LOST MANY ALONG THE WAY

MANY HAVE BEEN OUR AFFLICTIONS

AND OUR STORY IS YET TO BE TOLD

THOSE WHO DARED TO TELL, COUCHED IT IN THE LANGUAGE OF PEACE AND RECINCILLIATION

THEY ROMANTICIZED OUR STORY

AND PAINTED THE SCARS OF OUR FLESH ON ARTIFICIAL CANVASES

WHILE SIPPING WINE IN DINNER TABLES PREPARED BY OUR OWN MOTHERS

OUR STORY IS YET TO BE TOLD IN BOLD LETTERS

IT IS THE COLLECTIVE STORY OF BLACK PAIN

STORED AWAY FOR TWENTY YEARS

BECAUSE OF ITS INCONVENIENT TRUTH

HIDDEN AWAY FROM THE CAMERA

BECAUSE OF ITS GRAPHIC AND GRUESOME DETAIL

IT HAS BEEN WHITEWASHED

BECAUSE, WHILE IT LIBERATES GOD’S BLACK CHILDREN

IT IMPLICATES GOD’S WHITE CHILDREN

THIS IS OUR STORY

FINISH WHAT YOU’HE STARTED CHILDREN OF MARCUS GARVEY

FINISH WHAT YOU’VE STARTED CHILDREN OF THOMAS SANKARA

FINISH WHAT YOU’VE STARTED CHILDREN OF FANON

FINISH WHAT YOU’VE STARTED CHILDREN OF ROBERT MUGABE

FINISH WHAT YOU’VE STARTED CHILDREN OF ROBERT MANGALISO SOBUKWE

FINISH WHAT YOU’VE STARTED CHILDREN OF STEVEN BANTU BIKO

FINISH WHAT YOU’VE STARTED CHILDREN MAMA ASSATA SHAKUR

FINISH WHAT YOU’VE STARTED CHILDREN OF MAMA WINNIE MANDELA

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”

-Albert Camus

Be a bad bitch. But not too bad of a bitch. Be a bad bitch on my dick. Your bad bitchery must not extend outside of my paremeters of bad bitchidom. Dont be extreme about your bad bitchery like those lesbo feminists. Dont wear too much make up because you deceive us but wear make up because you look ugly without it but we must not see it even though we dont want to be deceived. Have a small waist and wide hips and bubble butt. It doesnt matter where you get them from but get those proportions because we will decide which parts of your body fat is acceptable. But remember not to dress like a hoe when you have them. Be respectable yet not a prude. Oso, pick up a book bitch. Stop with all these selfies and butt pictures on instagram (but it’s ok to send me naked pictures on whatsapp because it’s just me there ) and read Sobukwe or something. Stop with that weave but remember to have a big straightened Afro so that you still look feminine. Also, be Black conscious but also light skinned (dont tell me you use skin lighteners because i will make facebook groups shaming you) but of course Black is beautiful but not for me. Be mixed race so our kids can look exotic. No, no, no! I love Black people, how can you say that is self-hatred? It’s preference. Anyway, read a book bitch. But dont read too much. Dont read beyond the particular kinds of men I prescribe to you. Oso, are you remembering to look pretty while you read bitch? But not too pretty because you will cause me to rape you. You digg? Ok, sharp. Let’s continue. Read ke. But dont read books that are different to mine. Don’t read books that are going to contaminate your mind with ‘white feminism’. What is white feminism? I dont really know. It just sounds wrong and there is evidence that it breaks up the black home. Oh and have money. Yes, the black nation is oppressed but somehow come from a good family. Get off child support and get a job you lazy twerking bitch. But don’t make to much money more than me. I am the head of the home. But have money and stuff. Have you sent me those naked pics yet? Also, dont be too sexy on them because when I am mad at you I will post them all over the internet. But yeah, be a bad bitch.

first published as a Facebook post
re-posted here with kind permission of the author.

Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.

It is now technically feasible to reproduce without the aid of males (or, for that matter, females) and to produce only females. We must begin immediately to do so. Retaining the mail has not even the dubious purpose of reproduction. The male is a biological accident: the Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene, that is, it has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples.

The male is completely egocentric, trapped inside himself, incapable of empathizing or identifying with others, or love, friendship, affection of tenderness. He is a completely isolated unit, incapable of rapport with anyone. His responses are entirely visceral, not cerebral; his intelligence is a mere tool in the services of his drives and needs; he is incapable of mental passion, mental interaction; he can’t relate to anything other than his own physical sensations. He is a half-dead, unresponsive lump, incapable of giving or receiving pleasure or happiness; consequently, he is at best an utter bore, an inoffensive blob, since only those capable of absorption in others can be charming. He is trapped in a twilight zone halfway between humans and apes, and is far worse off than the apes because, unlike the apes, he is capable of a large array of negative feelings — hate, jealousy, contempt, disgust, guilt, shame, doubt — and moreover, he is aware of what he is and what he isn’t.

Although completely physical, the male is unfit even for stud service. Even assuming mechanical proficiency, which few men have, he is, first of all, incapable of zestfully, lustfully, tearing off a piece, but instead is eaten up with guilt, shame, fear and insecurity, feelings rooted in male nature, which the most enlightened training can only minimize; second, the physical feeling he attains is next to nothing; and third, he is not empathizing with his partner, but is obsessed with how he’s doing, turning in an A performance, doing a good plumbing job. To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo. It’s often said that men use women. Use them for what? Surely not pleasure.

Eaten up with guilt, shame, fears and insecurities and obtaining, if he’s lucky, a barely perceptible physical feeling, the male is, nonetheless, obsessed with screwing; he’ll swim through a river of snot, wade nostril-deep through a mile of vomit, if he thinks there’ll be a friendly pussy awaiting him. He’ll screw a woman he despises, any snaggle-toothed hag, and furthermore, pay for the opportunity. Why? Relieving physical tension isn’t the answer, as masturbation suffices for that. It’s not ego satisfaction; that doesn’t explain screwing corpses and babies.

Completely egocentric, unable to relate, empathize or identify, and filled with a vast, pervasive, diffuse sexuality, the male is pyschically passive. He hates his passivity, so he projects it onto women, defines the make as active, then sets out to prove that he is (`prove that he is a Man’). His main means of attempting to prove it is screwing (Big Man with a Big Dick tearing off a Big Piece). Since he’s attempting to prove an error, he must `prove’ it again and again. Screwing, then, is a desperate compulsive, attempt to prove he’s not passive, not a woman; but he is passive and does want to be a woman.

Being an incomplete female, the male spends his life attempting to complete himself, to become female. He attempts to do this by constantly seeking out, fraternizing with and trying to live through an fuse with the female, and by claiming as his own all female characteristics — emotional strength and independence, forcefulness, dynamism, decisiveness, coolness, objectivity, assertiveness, courage, integrity, vitality, intensity, depth of character, grooviness, etc — and projecting onto women all male traits — vanity, frivolity, triviality, weakness, etc. It should be said, though, that the male has one glaring area of superiority over the female — public relations. (He has done a brilliant job of convincing millions of women that men are women and women are men). The male claim that females find fulfillment through motherhood and sexuality reflects what males think they’d find fulfilling if they were female.

Women, in other words, don’t have penis envy; men have pussy envy. When the male accepts his passivity, defines himself as a woman (males as well as females thing men are women and women are men), and becomes a transvestite he loses his desire to screw (or to do anything else, for that matter; he fulfills himself as a drag queen) and gets his dick chopped off. He then achieves a continuous diffuse sexual feeling from `being a woman’. Screwing is, for a man, a defense against his desire to be female. He is responsible for:

War: The male’s normal compensation for not being female, namely, getting his Big Gun off, is grossly inadequate, as he can get it off only a very limited number of times; so he gets it off on a really massive scale, and proves to the entire world that he’s a `Man’. Since he has no compassion or ability to empathize or identify, proving his manhood is worth an endless amount of mutilation and suffering and an endless number of lives, including his own — his own life being worthless, he would rather go out in a blaze of glory than to plod grimly on for fifty more years.

Niceness, Politeness, and `Dignity’: Every man, deep down, knows he’s a worthless piece of shit. Overwhelmed by a sense of animalism and deeply ashamed of it; wanting, not to express himself, but to hide from others his total physicality, total egocentricity, the hate and contempt he feels for other men, and to hide from himself the hate and contempt he suspects other men feel for him; having a crudely constructed nervous system that is easily upset by the least display of emotion or feeling, the male tries to enforce a `social’ code that ensures perfect blandness, unsullied by the slightest trace or feeling or upsetting opinion. He uses terms like `copulate’, `sexual congress’, `have relations with’ (to men sexual relations is a redundancy), overlaid with stilted manners; the suit on the chimp.

Money, Marriage and Prostitution, Work and Prevention of an Automated Society: There is no human reason for money or for anyone to work more than two or three hours a week at the very most. All non-creative jobs (practically all jobs now being done) could have been automated long ago, and in a moneyless society everyone can have as much of the best of everything as she wants. But there are non-human, male reasons for wanting to maintain the money system:

1. Pussy. Despising his highly inadequate self, overcome with intense anxiety and a deep, profound loneliness when by his empty self, desperate to attach himself to any female in dim hopes of completing himself, in the mystical belief that by touching gold he’ll turn to gold, the male craves the continuous companionship of women. The company of the lowest female is preferable to his own or that of other men, who serve only to remind him of his repulsiveness. But females, unless very young or very sick, must be coerced or bribed into male company.

2. Supply the non-relating male with the delusion of usefulness, and enable him to try to justify his existence by digging holes and then filling them up. Leisure time horrifies the male, who will have nothing to do but contemplate his grotesque self. Unable to relate or to love, the male must work. Females crave absorbing, emotionally satisfying, meaningful activity, but lacking the opportunity or ability for this, they prefer to idle and waste away their time in ways of their own choosing — sleeping, shopping, bowling, shooting pool, playing cards and other games, breeding, reading, walking around, daydreaming, eating, playing with themselves, popping pills, going to the movies, getting analyzed, traveling, raising dogs and cats, lolling about on the beach, swimming, watching TV, listening to music, decorating their houses, gardening, sewing, nightclubbing, dancing, visiting, `improving their minds’ (taking courses), and absorbing `culture’ (lectures, plays, concerts, `arty’ movies). Therefore, many females would, even assuming complete economic equality between the sexes, prefer living with males or peddling their asses on the street, thus having most of their time for themselves, to spending many hours of their days doing boring, stultifying, non-creative work for someone else, functioning as less than animals, as machines, or, at best — if able to get a `good’ job — co-managing the shitpile. What will liberate women, therefore, from male control is the total elimination of the money-work system, not the attainment of economic equality with men within it.

3. Power and control. Unmasterful in his personal relations with women, the male attains to masterfulness by the manipulation of money and everything controlled by money, in other words, of everything and everybody.

4. Love substitute. Unable to give love or affection, the male gives money. It makes him feel motherly. The mother gives milk; he gives bread. He is the Breadwinner.

5. Provide the male with a goal. Incapable of enjoying the moment, the male needs something to look forward to, and money provides him with an eternal, never-ending goal: Just think of what you could do with 80 trillion dollars — invest it! And in three years time you’d have 300 trillion dollars!!!

6. Provide the basis for the male’s major opportunity to control and manipulate — fatherhood.

Fatherhood and Mental Illness (fear, cowardice, timidity, humility, insecurity, passivity): Mother wants what’s best for her kids; Daddy only wants what’s best for Daddy, that is peace and quiet, pandering to his delusion of dignity (`respect’), a good reflection on himself (status) and the opportunity to control and manipulate, or, if he’s an `enlightened’ father, to `give guidance’. His daughter, in addition, he wants sexually — he givers her hand in marriage; the other part is for him. Daddy, unlike Mother, can never give in to his kids, as he must, at all costs, preserve his delusion of decisiveness, forcefulness, always-rightness and strength. Never getting one’s way leads to lack of self-confidence in one’s ability to cope with the world and to a passive acceptance of the status quo. Mother loves her kids, although she sometimes gets angry, but anger blows over quickly and even while it exists, doesn’t preclude love and basic acceptance. Emotionally diseased Daddy doesn’t love his kids; he approves of them — if they’re `good’, that is, if they’re nice, `respectful’, obedient, subservient to his will, quiet and not given to unseemly displays of temper that would be most upsetting to Daddy’s easily disturbed male nervous system — in other words, if they’re passive vegetables. If they’re not `good’, he doesn’t get angry — not if he’s a modern, `civilized’ father (the old-fashioned ranting, raving brute is preferable, as he is so ridiculous he can be easily despised) — but rather express disapproval, a state that, unlike anger, endures and precludes a basic acceptance, leaving the kid with the feeling of worthlessness and a lifelong obsession wit being approved of; the result is fear of independent thought, as this leads to unconventional, disapproved of opinions and way of life.

For the kid to want Daddy’s approval it must respect Daddy, and being garbage, Daddy can make sure that he is respected only by remaining aloof, by distantness, by acting on the precept of `familiarity breeds contempt’, which is, of course, true, if one is contemptible. By being distant and aloof, he is able to remain unknown, mysterious, and thereby, to inspire fear (`respect’).

Disapproval of emotional `scenes’ leads to fear of strong emotion, fear of one’s own anger and hatred. Fear of anger and hatred combined with a lack of self-confidence in one’s ability to cope with and change the world, or even to affect in the slightest way one’s own destiny, leads to a mindless belief that the world and most people in it are nice and the most banal, trivial amusements are great fun and deeply pleasurable.

The affect of fatherhood on males, specifically, is to make them `Men’, that is, highly defensive of all impulses to passivity, faggotry, and of desires to be female. Every boy wants to imitate his mother, be her, fuse with her, but Daddy forbids this; he is the mother; he gets to fuse with her. So he tells the boy, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, to not be a sissy, to act like a `Man’. The boy, scared shitless of and `respecting’ his father, complies, and becomes just like Daddy, that model of `Man’-hood, the all-American ideal — the well-behaved heterosexual dullard.

The effect of fatherhood on females is to make them male — dependent, passive, domestic, animalistic, insecure, approval and security seekers, cowardly, humble, `respectful’ of authorities and men, closed, not fully responsive, half-dead, trivial, dull, conventional, flattened-out and thoroughly contemptible. Daddy’s Girl, always tense and fearful, uncool, unanalytical, lacking objectivity, appraises Daddy, and thereafter, other men, against a background of fear (`respect’) and is not only unable to see the empty shell behind the facade, but accepts the male definition of himself as superior, as a female, and of herself, as inferior, as a male, which, thanks to Daddy, she really is.

It is the increase of fatherhood, resulting from the increased and more widespread affluence that fatherhood needs in order to thrive, that has caused the general increase of mindlessness and the decline of women in the United States since the 1920s. The close association of affluence with fatherhood has led, for the most part, to only the wrong girls, namely, the `privileged’ middle class girls, getting `educated’.

The effect of fathers, in sum, has been to corrode the world with maleness. The male has a negative Midas Touch — everything he touches turns to shit.

Suppression of Individuality, Animalism (domesticity and motherhood), and Functionalism: The male is just a bunch of conditioned reflexes, incapable of a mentally free response; he is tied to he earliest conditioning, determined completely by his past experiences. His earliest experiences are with his mother, and he is throughout his life tied to her. It never becomes completely clear to the make that he is not part of his mother, that he is he and she is she.

His greatest need is to be guided, sheltered, protected and admired by Mama (men expect women to adore what men shrink from in horror — themselves) and, being completely physical, he yearns to spend his time (that’s not spent `out in the world’ grimly defending against his passivity) wallowing in basic animal activities — eating, sleeping, shitting, relaxing and being soothed by Mama. Passive, rattle-headed Daddy’s Girl, ever eager for approval, for a pat on the head, for the `respect’ if any passing piece of garbage, is easily reduced to Mama, mindless ministrator to physical needs, soother of the weary, apey brow, booster of the tiny ego, appreciator of the contemptible, a hot water bottle with tits.

The reduction to animals of the women of the most backward segment of society — the `privileged, educated’ middle-class, the backwash of humanity — where Daddy reigns supreme, has been so thorough that they try to groove on labour pains and lie around in the most advanced nation in the world in the middle of the twentieth century with babies chomping away on their tits. It’s not for the kids sake, though, that the `experts’ tell women that Mama should stay home and grovel in animalism, but for Daddy’s; the tits for Daddy to hang onto; the labor pains for Daddy to vicariously groove on (half dead, he needs awfully strong stimuli to make him respond).

Reducing the female to an animal, to Mama, to a male, is necessary for psychological as well as practical reasons: the male is a mere member of the species, interchangeable with every other male. He has no deep-seated individuality, which stems from what intrigues you, what outside yourself absorbs you, what you’re in relation to. Completely self-absorbed, capable of being in relation only to their bodies and physical sensations, males differ from each other only to the degree and in the ways they attempt to defend against their passivity and against their desire to be female.

The female’s individuality, which he is acutely aware of, but which he doesn’t comprehend and isn’t capable of relating to or grasping emotionally, frightens and upsets him and fills him with envy. So he denies it in her and proceeds to define everyone in terms of his or her function or use, assigning to himself, of course, the most important functions — doctor, president, scientist — therefore providing himself with an identity, if not individuality, and tries to convince himself and women (he’s succeeded best at convincing women) that the female function is to bear and raise children and to relax, comfort and boost the ego if the male; that her function is such as to make her interchangeable with every other female. In actual fact, the female function is to relate, groove, love and be herself, irreplaceable by anyone else; the male function is to produce sperm. We now have sperm banks.

In actual fact, the female function is to explore, discover, invent, solve problems crack jokes, make music — all with love. In other words, create a magic world.

Prevention of Privacy: Although the male, being ashamed of what he is and almost of everything he does, insists on privacy and secrecy in all aspects of his life, he has no real regard for privacy. Being empty, not being a complete, separate being, having no self to groove on and needing to be constantly in female company, he sees nothing at all wrong in intruding himself on any woman’s thoughts, even a total stranger’s, anywhere at any time, but rather feels indignant and insulted when put down for doing so, as well as confused — he can’t, for the life of him, understand why anyone would prefer so much as one minute of solitude to the company of any creep around. Wanting to become a woman, he strives to be constantly around females, which is the closest he can get to becoming one, so he created a `society’ based upon the family — a male-female could and their kids (the excuse for the family’s existence), who live virtually on top of one another, unscrupuluously violating the females’ rights, privacy and sanity.

Isolation, Suburbs, and Prevention of Community: Our society is not a community, but merely a collection of isolated family units. Desperately insecure, fearing his woman will leave him if she is exposed to other men or to anything remotely resembling life, the male seeks to isolate her from other men and from what little civilization there is, so he moves her out to the suburbs, a collection of self-absorbed couples and their kids. Isolation enables him to try to maintain his pretense of being an individual nu becoming a `rugged individualist’, a loner, equating non-cooperation and solitariness with individuality.

There is yet another reason for the male to isolate himself: every man is an island. Trapped inside himself, emotionally isolated, unable to relate, the male has a horror of civilization, people, cities, situations requiring an ability to understand and relate to people. So like a scared rabbit, he scurries off, dragging Daddy’s little asshole with him to the wilderness, suburbs, or, in the case of the hippy — he’s way out, Man! — all the way out to the cow pasture where he can fuck and breed undisturbed and mess around with his beads and flute.

The `hippy’, whose desire to be a `Man’, a `rugged individualist’, isn’t quite as strong as the average man’s, and who, in addition, is excited by the thought having lots of women accessible to him, rebels against the harshness of a Breadwinner’s life and the monotony of one woman. In the name of sharing and cooperation, he forms a commune or tribe, which, for all its togetherness and partly because of it, (the commune, being an extended family, is an extended violation of the female’s rights, privacy and sanity) is no more a community than normal `society’.

A true community consists of individuals — not mere species members, not couples — respecting each others individuality and privacy, at the same time interacting with each other mentally and emotionally — free spirits in free relation to each other — and co-operating with each other to achieve common ends. Traditionalists say the basic unit of `society’ is the family; `hippies’ say the tribe; no one says the individual.

The `hippy’ babbles on about individuality, but has no more conception of it than any other man. He desires to get back to Nature, back to the wilderness, back to the home of furry animals that he’s one of, away from the city, where there is at least a trace, a bare beginning of civilization, to live at the species level, his time taken up with simple, non-intellectual activities — farming, fucking, bead stringing. The most important activity of the commune, the one upon which it is based, is gang-banging. The `hippy’ is enticed to the commune mainly by the prospect for free pussy — the main commodity to be shared, to be had just for the asking, but, blinded by greed, he fails to anticipate all the other men he has to share with, or the jealousies and possessiveness for the pussies themselves.

Men cannot co-operate to achieve a common end, because each man’s end is all the pussy for himself. The commune, therefore, is doomed to failure; each `hippy’ will, in panic, grad the first simpleton who digs him and whisks her off to the suburbs as fast as he can. The male cannot progress socially, but merely swings back and forth from isolation to gang-banging.

Conformity: Although he wants to be an individual, the male is scared of anything in himself that is the slightest bit different from other men, it causes him to suspect that he’s not really a `Man’, that he’s passive and totally sexual, a highly upsetting suspicion. If other men are “A” and he’s not, he must not be a man; he must be a fag. So he tries to affirm his `Manhood’ by being like all the other men. Differentness in other men, as well as himself, threatens him; it means they’re fags whom he must at all costs avoid, so he tries to make sure that all other men conform.

The male dares to be different to the degree that he accepts his passivity and his desire to be female, his fagginess. The farthest out male is the drag queen, but he, although different from most men, is exactly like all the other drag queens like the functionalist, he has an identity — he is female. He tries to define all his troubles away — but still no individuality. Not completely convinced that he’s a woman, highly insecure about being sufficiently female, he conforms compulsively to the man-made stereotype, ending up as nothing but a bundle of stilted mannerisms.

To be sure he’s a `Man’, the male must see to it that the female be clearly a `Woman’, the opposite of a `Man’, that is, the female must act like a faggot. And Daddy’s Girl, all of whose female instincts were wrenched out of her when little, easily and obligingly adapts herself to the role.

Authority and Government: Having no sense of right and wrong, no conscience, which can only stem from having an ability to empathize with others… having no faith in his non-existent self, being unnecessarily competitive, and by nature, unable to co-operate, the male feels a need for external guidance and control. So he created authorities — priests, experts, bosses, leaders, etc — and government. Wanting the female (Mama) to guide him, but unable to accept this fact (he is, after all, a MAN), wanting to play Woman, to usurp her function as Guider and Protector, he sees to it that all authorities are male.

There’s no reason why a society consisting of rational beings capable of empathizing with each other, complete and having no natural reason to compete, should have a government, laws or leaders.

Philosophy, Religion, and Morality Based on Sex: The male’s inability to relate to anybody or anything makes his life pointless and meaningless (the ultimate male insight is that life is absurd), so he invented philosophy and religion. Being empty, he looks outward, not only for guidance and control, but for salvation and for the meaning of life. Happiness being for him impossible on this earth, he invented Heaven.

For a man, having no ability to empathize with others and being totally sexual, `wrong’ is sexual `license’ and engaging in `deviant’ (`unmanly’) sexual practices, that is, not defending against his passivity and total sexuality which, if indulged, would destroy `civilization’, since `civilization’ is based entirely upon the male need to defend himself against these characteristics. For a woman (according to men), `wrong’ is any behavior that would entice men into sexual `license’ — that is, not placing male needs above her own and not being a faggot.

Religion not only provides the male with a goal (Heaven) and helps keep women tied to men, but offers rituals through which he can try to expiate the guilt and shame he feels at not defending himself enough against his sexual impulses; in essence, that guilt and shame he feels at being male.

Most men men, utterly cowardly, project their inherent weaknesses onto women, label them female weaknesses and believe themselves to have female strengths; most philosophers, not quite so cowardly, face the fact that make lacks exist in men, but still can’t face the fact that they exist in men only. So they label the male condition the Human Condition, post their nothingness problem, which horrifies them, as a philosophical dilemma, thereby giving stature to their animalism, grandiloquently label their nothingness their `Identity Problem’, and proceed to prattle on pompously about the `Crisis of the Individual’, the `Essence of Being’, `Existence preceding Essence’, `Existential Modes of Being’, etc. etc.

A woman not only takes her identity and individuality for granted, but knows instinctively that the only wrong is to hurt others, and that the meaning of life is love.

Prejudice (racial, ethnic, religious, etc): The male needs scapegoats onto whom he can project his failings and inadequacies and upon whom he can vent his frustration at not being female. And the vicarious discriminations have the practical advantage of substantially increasing the pussy pool available to the men on top.

Competition, Prestige, Status, Formal Education, Ignorance and Social and Economic Classes: Having an obsessive desire to be admired by women, but no intrinsic worth, the make constructs a highly artificial society enabling him to appropriate the appearance of worth through money, prestige, `high’ social class, degrees, professional position and knowledge and, by pushing as many other men as possible down professionally, socially, economically, and educationally.

The purpose of `higher’ education is not to educate but to exclude as many as possible from the various professions.

The male, totally physical, incapable of mental rapport, although able to understand and use knowledge and ideas, is unable to relate to them, to grasp them emotionally: he does not value knowledge and ideas for their own sake (they’re just means to ends) and, consequently, feels no need for mental companions, no need to cultivate the intellectual potentialities of others. On the contrary, the male has a vested interest in ignorance; it gives the few knowledgeable men a decided edge on the unknowledgeable ones, and besides, the male knows that an enlightened, aware female population will mean the end of him. The healthy, conceited female wants the company of equals whom she can respect and groove on; the male and the sick, insecure, unself-confident male female crave the company of worms.

No genuine social revolution can be accomplished by the male, as the male on top wants the status quo, and all the male on the bottom wants is to be the male on top. The male `rebel’ is a farce; this is the male’s `society’, made by him to satisfy his needs. He’s never satisfied, because he’s not capable of being satisfied. Ultimately, what the male `rebel’ is rebelling against is being male. The male changes only when forced to do so by technology, when he has no choice, when `society’ reaches the stage where he must change or die. We’re at that stage now; if women don’t get their asses in gear fast, we may very well all die.

Prevention of Conversation: Being completely self-centered and unable to relate to anything outside himself, the male’s `conversation’, when not about himself, is an impersonal droning on, removed from anything of human value. Male `intellectual conversation’ is a strained compulsive attempt to impress the female.

Daddy’s Girl, passive, adaptable, respectful of and in awe of the male, allows him to impose his hideously dull chatter on her. This is not too difficult for her, as the tension and anxiety, the lack of cool, the insecurity and self-doubt, the unsureness of her own feelings and sensations that Daddy instilled in her make her perceptions superficial and render her unable to see that the male’s babble is babble; like the aesthete `appreciating’ the blob that’s labeled `Great Art’, she believes she’s grooving on what bores the shit out of her. Not only does she permit his babble to dominate, she adapts her own `conversation’ accordingly.

Trained from an early childhood in niceness, politeness and `dignity’, in pandering to the male need to disguise his animalism, she obligingly reduces her own `conversation’ to small talk, a bland, insipid avoidance of any topic beyond the utterly trivial — or is `educated’, to `intellectual’ discussion, that is, impersonal discoursing on irrelevant distractions — the Gross National Product, the Common Market, the influence of Rimbaud on symbolist painting. So adept is she at pandering that it eventually becomes second nature and she continues to pander to men even when in the company of other females only.

Apart from pandering, her `conversation’ is further limited by her insecurity about expressing deviant, original opinions and the self-absorption based on insecurity and that prevents her conversation from being charming. Niceness, politeness, `dignity’, insecurity and self-absorption are hardly conducive to intensity and wit, qualities a conversation must have to be worthy of the name. Such conversation is hardly rampant, as only completely self-confident, arrogant, outgoing, proud, tough-minded females are capable of intense, bitchy, witty conversation.

Prevention of Friendship (Love): Men have contempt for themselves, for all other men whom they contemplate more than casually and whom they do not think are females, (for example `sympathetic’ analysts and `Great Artists’) or agents of God and for all women who respect and pander to them: the insecure, approval-seeking, pandering male-females have contempt for themselves and for all women like them: the self-confident, swinging, thrill-seeking female females have contempt for me and for the pandering male females. In short, contempt is the order of the day.

Love is not dependency or sex, but friendship, and therefore, love can’t exist between two males, between a male and a female, or between two females, one or both of whom is a mindless, insecure, pandering male; like conversation, live can exist only between two secure, free-wheeling, independent groovy female females, since friendship is based upon respect, not contempt.

Even amongst groovy females deep friendships seldom occur in adulthood, as almost all of them are either tied up with men in order to survive economically, or bogged down in hacking their way through the jungle and in trying to keep their heads about the amorphous mass. Love can’t flourish in a society based upon money and meaningless work: it requires complete economic as well as personal freedom, leisure time and the opportunity to engage in intensely absorbing, emotionally satisfying activities which, when shared with those you respect, lead to deep friendship. Our `society’ provides practically no opportunity to engage in such activities.

Having stripped the world of conversation, friendship and love, the male offers us these paltry substitutes:

`Great Art’ and `Culture’: The male `artist’ attempts to solve his dilemma of not being able to live, of not being female, by constructing a highly artificial world in which the male is heroized, that is, displays female traits, and the female is reduced to highly limited, insipid subordinate roles, that is, to being male.

The male `artistic’ aim being, not to communicate (having nothing inside him he has nothing to say), but to disguise his animalism, he resorts to symbolism and obscurity (`deep’ stuff). The vast majority of people, particularly the `educated’ ones, lacking faith in their own judgment, humble, respectful of authority (`Daddy knows best’), are easily conned into believing that obscurity, evasiveness, incomprehensibility, indirectness, ambiguity and boredom are marks of depth and brilliance.

`Great Art’ proves that men are superior to women, that men are women, being labeled `Great Art’, almost all of which, as the anti-feminists are fond of reminding us, was created by men. We know that `Great Art’ is great because male authorities have told us so, and we can’t claim otherwise, as only those with exquisite sensitivities far superior to ours can perceive and appreciated the slop they appreciated.

Appreciating is the sole diversion of the `cultivated’; passive and incompetent, lacking imagination and wit, they must try to make do with that; unable to create their own diversions, to create a little world of their own, to affect in the smallest way their environments, they must accept what’s given; unable to create or relate, they spectate. Absorbing `culture’ is a desperate, frantic attempt to groove in an ungroovy world, to escape the horror of a sterile, mindless, existence. `Culture’ provides a sop to the egos of the incompetent, a means of rationalizing passive spectating; they can pride themselves on their ability to appreciate the `finer’ things, to see a jewel where this is only a turd (they want to be admired for admiring). Lacking faith in their ability to change anything, resigned to the status quo, they have to see beauty in turds because, so far as they can see, turds are all they’ll ever have.

The veneration of `Art’ and `Culture’ — besides leading many women into boring, passive activity that distracts from more important and rewarding activities, from cultivating active abilities, and leads to the constant intrusion on our sensibilities of pompous dissertations on the deep beauty of this and that turn. This allows the `artist’ to be setup as one possessing superior feelings, perceptions, insights and judgments, thereby undermining the faith of insecure women in the value and validity of their own feelings, perceptions, insights and judgments.

The male, having a very limited range of feelings, and consequently, very limited perceptions, insights and judgments, needs the `artist’ to guide him, to tell him what life is all about. But the male `artist’ being totally sexual, unable to relate to anything beyond his own physical sensations, having nothing to express beyond the insight that for the male life is meaningless and absurd, cannot be an artist. How can he who is not capable of life tell us what life is all about? A `male artist’ is a contradiction in terms. A degenerate can only produce degenerate `art’. The true artist is every self-confident, healthy female, and in a female society the only Art, the only Culture, will be conceited, kooky, funky, females grooving on each other and on everything else in the universe.

Sexuality: Sex is not part of a relationship: on the contrary, it is a solitary experience, non-creative, a gross waste of time. The female can easily — far more easily than she may think — condition away her sex drive, leaving her completely cool and cerebral and free to pursue truly worthy relationships and activities; but the male, who seems to dig women sexually and who seeks out constantly to arouse them, stimulates the highly sexed female to frenzies of lust, throwing her into a sex bag from which few women ever escape. The lecherous male excited the lustful female; he has to — when the female transcends her body, rises above animalism, the male, whose ego consists of his cock, will disappear.

Sex is the refuge of the mindless. And the more mindless the woman, the more deeply embedded in the male `culture’, in short, the nicer she is, the more sexual she is. The nicest women in our `society’ are raving sex maniacs. But, being just awfully, awfully nice, they don’t, of course descend to fucking — that’s uncouth — rather they make love, commune by means of their bodies and establish sensual rapport; the literary ones are attuned to the throb of Eros and attain a clutch upon the Universe; the religious have spiritual communion with the Divine Sensualism; the mystics merge with the Erotic Principle and blend with the Cosmos, and the acid heads contact their erotic cells.

On the other hand, those females least embedded in the male `Culture’, the least nice, those crass and simple souls who reduce fucking to fucking, who are too childish for the grown-up world of suburbs, mortgages, mops and baby shit, too selfish to raise kids and husbands, too uncivilized to give a shit for anyones opinion of them, too arrogant to respect Daddy, the `Greats’ or the deep wisdom of the Ancients, who trust only their own animal, gutter instincts, who equate Culture with chicks, whose sole diversion is prowling for emotional thrills and excitement, who are given to disgusting, nasty upsetting `scenes’, hateful, violent bitches given to slamming those who unduly irritate them in the teeth, who’d sink a shiv into a man’s chest or ram an icepick up his asshole as soon as look at him, if they knew they could get away with it, in short, those who, by the standards of our `culture’ are SCUM… these females are cool and relatively cerebral and skirting asexuality.

Unhampered by propriety, niceness, discretion, public opinion, `morals’, the respect of assholes, always funky, dirty, low-down SCUM gets around… and around and around… they’ve seen the whole show — every bit of it — the fucking scene, the dyke scene — they’ve covered the whole waterfront, been under every dock and pier — the peter pier, the pussy pier… you’ve got to go through a lot of sex to get to anti-sex, and SCUM’s been through it all, and they’re now ready for a new show; they want to crawl out from other the dock, move, take off, sink out. But SCUM doesn’t yet prevail; SCUM’s still in the gutter of our `society’, which, if it’s not deflected from its present course and if the Bomb doesn’t drop on it, will hump itself to death.

Boredom: Life in a society made by and for creatures who, when they are not grim and depressing are utter bores, van only be, when not grim and depressing, an utter bore.

Secrecy, Censorship, Suppression of Knowledge and Ideas, and Exposes: Every male’s deep-seated, secret, most hideous fear is of being discovered to be not a female, but a male, a subhuman animal. Although niceness, politeness and `dignity’ suffice to prevent his exposure on a personal level, in order to prevent the general exposure of the male sex as a whole and to maintain his unnatural dominant position position in `society’, the male must resort to:

1. Censorship. Responding reflexively to isolated works and phrases rather than cereberally to overall meanings, the male attempts to prevent the arousal and discovery of his animalism by censoring not only `pornography’, but any work containing `dirty’ words, no matter in what context they are used.

2. Suppression of all ideas and knowledge that might expose him or threaten his dominant position in `society’. Much biological and psychological data is suppressed, because it is proof of the male’s gross inferiority to the female. Also, the problem of mental illness will never be solved while the male maintains control, because first, men have a vested interest in it — only females who have very few of their marbles will allow males the slightest bit of control over anything, and second, the male cannot admit to the role that fatherhood plays in causing mental illness.

3. Exposes. The male’s chief delight in life — insofar as the tense, grim male can ever be said to delight in anything — is in exposing others. It doesn’t’ much matter what they’re exposed as, so long as they’re exposed; it distracts attention from himself. Exposing others as enemy agents (Communists and Socialists) is one of his favorite pastimes, as it removes the source of the threat to him not only from himself, but from the country and the Western world. The bugs up his ass aren’t in him, they’re in Russia.

Distrust: Unable to empathize or feel affection or loyalty, being exclusively out for himself, the male has no sense of fair play; cowardly, needing constantly to pander to the female to win her approval, that he is helpless without, always on the edge lest his animalism, his maleness be discovered, always needing to cover up, he must lie constantly; being empty he has not honor or integrity — he doesn’t know what those words mean. The male, in short, is treacherous, and the only appropriate attitude in a male `society’ is cynicism and distrust.

Ugliness: Being totally sexual, incapable of cerebral or aesthetic responses, totally materialistic and greedy, the male, besides inflicting on the world `Great Art’, has decorated his unlandscaped cities with ugly buildings (both inside and out), ugly decors, billboards, highways, cars, garbage trucks, and, most notably, his own putrid self.

Hatred and Violence: The male is eaten up with tension, with frustration at not being female, at not being capable of ever achieving satisfaction or pleasure of any kind; eaten up with hate — not rational hate that is directed at those who abuse or insult you — but irrational, indiscriminate hate… hatred, at bottom, of his own worthless self.

Gratuitous violence, besides `proving’ he’s a `Man’, serves as an outlet for his hate and, in addition — the male being capable only of sexual responses and needing very strong stimuli to stimulate his half-dead self — provides him with a little sexual thrill..

Disease and Death: All diseases are curable, and the aging process and death are due to disease; it is possible, therefore, never to age and to live forever. In fact the problems of aging and death could be solved within a few years, if an all-out, massive scientific assault were made upon the problem. This, however, will not occur with the male establishment because:

1. The many male scientists who shy away from biological research, terrified of the discovery that males are females, and show marked preference for virile, `manly’ war and death programs.

2. The discouragement of many potential scientists from scientific careers by the rigidity, boringness, expensiveness, time-consumingness, and unfair exclusivity of our `higher’ educational system.

3. Propaganda disseminated by insecure male professionals, who jealously guard their positions, so that only a highly select few can comprehend abstract scientific concepts.

4. Widespread lack of self-confidence brought about by the father system that discourages many talented girls from becoming scientists.

5. Lack of automation. There now exists a wealth of data which, if sorted out and correlated, would reveal the cure for cancer and several other diseases and possibly the key to life itself. But the data is so massive it requires high speed computers to correlate it all. The institution of computers will be delayed interminably under the male control system, since the male has a horror of being replaced by machines.

6. The money systems’ insatiable need for new products. Most of the few scientists around who aren’t working on death programs are tied up doing research for corporations.

7. The males like death — it excites him sexually and, already dead inside, he wants to die.

8. The bias of the money system for the least creative scientists. Most scientists come from at least relatively affluent families where Daddy reigns supreme.

Incapable of a positive state of happiness, which is the only thing that can justify one’s existence, the male is, at best, relaxed, comfortable, neutral, and this condition is extremely short-lived, as boredom, a negative state, soon sets in; he is, therefore, doomed to an existence of suffering relieved only by occasional, fleeting stretches of restfulness, which state he can only achieve at the expense of some female. The male is, by his very nature, a leech, an emotional parasite and, therefore, not ethically entitled to live, as no one as the right to life at someone else’s expense.

Just as humans have a prior right to existence over dogs by virtue of being more highly evolved and having a superior consciousness, so women have a prior right to existence over men. The elimination of any male is, therefore, a righteous and good act, an act highly beneficial to women as well as an act of mercy.

However, this moral issue will eventually be rendered academic by the fact that the male is gradually eliminating himself. In addition to engaging in the time-honored and classical wars and race riots, men are more and more either becoming fags or are obliterating themselves through drugs. The female, whether she likes it or not, will eventually take complete charge, if for no other reason than that she will have to — the male, for practical purposes, won’t exist.

Accelerating this trend is the fact that more and more males are acquiring enlightened self-interest; they’re realizing more and more that the female interest is in their interest, that they can live only through the female and that the more the female is encouraged to live, to fulfill herself, to be a female and not a male, the more nearly he lives; he’s coming to see that it’s easier and more satisfactory to live through her than to try to become her and usurp her qualities, claim them as his own, push the female down and claim that she’s a male. The fag, who accepts his maleness, that is, his passivity and total sexuality, his femininity, is also best served by women being truly female, as it would then be easier for him to be male, feminine. If men were wise they would seek to become really female, would do intensive biological research that would lead to me, by means of operations on the brain and nervous system, being able t to be transformed in psyche, as well as body, into women.

Whether to continue to use females for reproduction or to reproduce in the laboratory will also become academic: what will happen when every female, twelve and over, is routinely taking the Pill and there are no longer any accidents? How many women will deliberately get or (if an accident) remain pregnant? No, Virginia, women don’t just adore being brood mares, despite what the mass of robot, brainwashed women will say. When society consists of only the fully conscious the answer will be none. Should a certain percentage of men be set aside by force to serve as brood mares for the species? Obviously this will not do. The answer is laboratory reproduction of babies.

As for the issue of whether or not to continue to reproduce males, it doesn’t follow that because the male, like disease, has always existed among us that he should continue to exist. When genetic control is possible — and soon it will be — it goes without saying that we should produce only whole, complete beings, not physical defects of deficiencies, including emotional deficiencies, such as maleness. Just as the deliberate production of blind people would be highly immoral, so would be the deliberate production of emotional cripples.

Why produce even females? Why should there be future generations? What is their purpose? When aging and death are eliminated, why continue to reproduce? Why should we care what happens when we’re dead? Why should we care that there is no younger generation to succeed us.

Eventually the natural course of events, of social evolution, will lead to total female control of the world and, subsequently, to the cessation of the production of males and, ultimately, to the cessation of the production of females.

But SCUM is impatient; SCUM is not consoled by the thought that future generations will thrive; SCUM wants to grab some thrilling living for itself. And, if a large majority of women were SCUM, they could acquire complete control of this country within a few weeks simply by withdrawing from the labor force, thereby paralyzing the entire nation. Additional measures, any one of which would be sufficient to completely disrupt the economy and everything else, would be for women to declare themselves off the money system, stop buying, just loot and simply refuse to obey all laws they don’t care to obey. The police force, National Guard, Army, Navy and Marines combined couldn’t squelch a rebellion of over half the population, particularly when it’s made up of people they are utterly helpless without.

If all women simply left men, refused to have anything to do with any of them — ever, all men, the government, and the national economy would collapse completely. Even without leaving men, women who are aware of the extent of their superiority to and power over men, could acquire complete control over everything within a few weeks, could effect a total submission of males to females. In a sane society the male would trot along obediently after the female. The male is docile and easily led, easily subjected to the domination of any female who cares to dominate him. The male, in fact, wants desperately to be led by females, wants Mama in charge, wants to abandon himself to her care. But this is not a sane society, and most women are not even dimly aware of where they’re at in relation to men.

The conflict, therefore, is not between females and males, but between SCUM — dominant, secure, self-confident, nasty, violent, selfish, independent, proud, thrill-seeking, free-wheeling, arrogant females, who consider themselves fit to rule the universe, who have free-wheeled to the limits of this `society’ and are ready to wheel on to something far beyond what it has to offer — and nice, passive, accepting `cultivated’, polite, dignified, subdued, dependent, scared, mindless, insecure, approval-seeking Daddy’s Girls, who can’t cope with the unknown, who want to hang back with the apes, who feel secure only with Big Daddy standing by, with a big strong man to lean on and with a fat, hairy face in the White House, who are too cowardly to face up to the hideous reality of what a man is, what Daddy is, who have cast their lot with the swine, who have adapted themselves to animalism, feel superficially comfortable with it and know no other way of `life’, who have reduced their minds, thoughts and sights to the male level, who, lacking sense, imagination and wit can have value only in a male `society’, who can have a place in the sun, or, rather, in the slime, only as soothers, ego boosters, relaxers and breeders, who are dismissed as inconsequents by other females, who project their deficiencies, their maleness, onto all females and see the female as worm.

But SCUM is too impatient to wait for the de-brainwashing of millions of assholes. Why should the swinging females continue to plod dismally along with the dull male ones? Why should the fates of the groovy and the creepy be intertwined? Why should the active and imaginative consult the passive and dull on social policy? Why should the independent be confined to the sewer along with the dependent who need Daddy to cling to? A small handful of SCUM can take over the country within a year by systematically fucking up the system, selectively destroying property, and murder:

SCUM will become members of the unwork force, the fuck-up force; they will get jobs of various kinds an unwork. For example, SCUM salesgirls will not charge for merchandise; SCUM telephone operators will not charge for calls; SCUM office and factory workers, in addition to fucking up their work, will secretly destroy equipment. SCUM will unwork at a job until fired, then get a new job to unwork at.

SCUM will forcibly relieve bus drivers, cab drivers and subway token sellers of their jobs and run buses and cabs and dispense free tokens to the public.

SCUM will destroy all useless and harmful objects — cars, store windows, `Great Art’, etc.

Eventually SCUM will take over the airwaves — radio and TV networks — by forcibly relieving of their jobs all radio and TV employees who would impede SCUM’s entry into the broadcasting studios.

SCUM will couple-bust — barge into mixed (male-female) couples, wherever they are, and bust them up.

SCUM will kill all men who are not in the Men’s Auxiliary of SCUM. Men in the Men’s Auxiliary are those men who are working diligently to eliminate themselves, men who, regardless of their motives, do good, men who are playing pall with SCUM. A few examples of the men in the Men’s Auxiliary are: men who kill men; biological scientists who are working on constructive programs, as opposed to biological warfare; journalists, writers, editors, publishers and producers who disseminate and promote ideas that will lead to the achievement of SCUM’s goals; faggots who, by their shimmering, flaming example, encourage other men to de-man themselves and thereby make themselves relatively inoffensive; men who consistently give things away — money, things, services; men who tell it like it is (so far not one ever has), who put women straight, who reveal the truth about themselves, who give the mindless male females correct sentences to parrot, who tell them a woman’s primary goal in life should be to squash the male sex (to aid men in this endeavor SCUM will conduct Turd Sessions, at which every male present will give a speech beginning with the sentence: `I am a turd, a lowly abject turd’, then proceed to list all the ways in which he is. His reward for doing so will be the opportunity to fraternize after the session for a whole, solid hour with the SCUM who will be present. Nice, clean-living male women will be invited to the sessions to help clarify any doubts and misunderstandings they may have about the male sex; makers and promoters of sex books and movies, etc., who are hastening the day when all that will be shown on the screen will be Suck and Fuck (males, like the rats following the Pied Piper, will be lured by Pussy to their doom, will be overcome and submerged by and will eventually drown in the passive flesh that they are); drug pushers and advocates, who are hastening the dropping out of men.

Being in the Men’s Auxiliary is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for making SCUM’s escape list; it’s not enough to do good; to save their worthless asses men must also avoid evil. A few examples of the most obnoxious or harmful types are: rapists, politicians and all who are in their service (campaigners, members of political parties, etc); lousy singers and musicians; Chairmen of Boards; Breadwinners; landlords; owners of greasy spoons and restaraunts that play Muzak; `Great Artists’; cheap pikers and welchers; cops; tycoons; scientists working on death and destruction programs or for private industry (practically all scientists); liars and phonies; disc jockies; men who intrude themselves in the slightest way on any strange female; real estate men; stock brokers; men who speak when they have nothing to say; men who sit idly on the street and mar the landscape with their presence; double dealers; flim-flam artists; litterbugs; plagiarisers; men who in the slightest way harm any female; all men in the advertising industry; psychiatrists and clinical psychologists; dishonest writers, journalists, editors, publishers, etc.; censors on both the public and private levels; all members of the armed forces, including draftees (LBJ and McNamara give orders, but servicemen carry them out) and particularly pilots (if the bomb drops, LBJ won’t drop it; a pilot will). In the case of a man whose behavior falls into both the good and bad categories, an overall subjective evaluation of him will be made to determine if his behavior is, in the balance, good or bad.

It is most tempting to pick off the female `Great Artists’, liars and phonies etc along with the men, but that would be inexpedient, as it would not be clear to most of the public that the female killed was a male. All women have a fink streak in them, to a greater or lesser degree, but it stems from a lifetime of living among men. Eliminate men and women will shape up. Women are improvable; men are no, although their behavior is. When SCUM gets hot on their asses it’ll shape up fast.

Simultaneously with the fucking-up, looting, couple-busting, destroying and killing, SCUM will recruit. SCUM, then, will consist of recruiters; the elite corps — the hard core activists (the fuck-ups, looters and destroyers) and the elite of the elite — the killers.

Dropping out is not the answer; fucking-up is. Most women are already dropped out; they were never in. Dropping out gives control to those few who don’t drop out; dropping out is exactly what the establishment leaders want; it plays into the hands of the enemy; it strengthens the system instead of undermining it, since it is based entirely on the non-participating, passivity, apathy and non-involvement of the mass of women. Dropping out, however, is an excellent policy for men, and SCUM will enthusiastically encourage it.

Looking inside yourself for salvation, contemplating your navel, is not, as the Drop Out people would have you believe, the answer. Happiness likes outside yourself, is achieved through interacting with others. Self-forgetfulness should be one’s goal, not self-absorption. The male, capable of only the latter, makes a virtue of irremediable fault and sets up self-absorption, not only as a good but as a Philosophical Good, and thus gets credit for being deep.

SCUM will not picket, demonstrate, march or strike to attempt to achieve its ends. Such tactics are for nice, genteel ladies who scrupulously take only such action as is guaranteed to be ineffective. In addition, only decent, clean-living male women, highly trained in submerging themselves in the species, act on a mob basis. SCUM consists of individuals; SCUM is not a mob, a blob. Only as many SCUM will do a job as are needed for the job. Also SCUM, being cool and selfish, will not subject to getting itself rapped on the head with billy clubs; that’s for the nice, `privileged, educated’, middle-class ladies with a high regard for the touching faith in the essential goodness of Daddy and policemen. If SCUM ever marches, it will be over the President’s stupid, sickening face; if SCUM ever strikes, it will be in the dark with a six-inch blade.

SCUM will always operate on a criminal as opposed to a civil disobedience basis, that is, as opposed to openly violating the law and going to jail in order to draw attention to an injustice. Such tactics acknowledge the rightness overall system and are used only to modify it slightly, change specific laws. SCUM is against the entire system, the very idea of law and government. SCUM is out to destroy the system, not attain certain rights within it. Also, SCUM — always selfish, always cool — will always aim to avoid detection and punishment. SCUM will always be furtive, sneaky, underhanded (although SCUM murders will always be known to be such).

Both destruction and killing will be selective and discriminate. SCUM is against half-crazed, indiscriminate riots, with no clear objective in mind, and in which many of your own kind are picked off. SCUM will never instigate, encourage or participate in riots of any kind or other form of indiscriminate destruction. SCUM will coolly, furtively, stalk its prey and quietly move in for the kill. Destruction will never me such as to block off routes needed for the transportation of food or other essential supplies, contaminate or cut off the water supply, block streets and traffic to the extent that ambulances can’t get through or impede the functioning of hospitals.

SCUM will keep on destroying, looting, fucking-up and killing until the money-work system no longer exists and automation is completely instituted or until enough women co-operate with SCUM to make violence unnecessary to achieve these goals, that is, until enough women either unwork or quit work, start looting, leave men and refuse to obey all laws inappropriate to a truly civilized society. Many women will fall into line, but many others, who surrendered long ago to the enemy, who are so adapted to animalism, to maleness, that they like restrictions and restraints, don’t know what to do with freedom, will continue to be toadies and doormats, just as peasants in rice paddies remain peasants in rice paddies as one regime topples another. A few of the more volatile will whimper and sulk and throw their toys and dishrags on the floor, but SCUM will continue to steamroller over them.

A completely automated society can be accomplished very simply and quickly once there is a public demand for it. The blueprints for it are already in existence, and it’s construction will take only a few weeks with millions of people working on it. Even though off the money system, everyone will be most happy to pitch in and get the automated society built; it will mark the beginning of a fantastic new era, and there will be a celebration atmosphere accompanying the construction.

The elimination of money and the complete institution of automation are basic to all other SCUM reforms; without these two the others can’t take place; with them the others will take place very rapidly. The government will automatically collapse. With complete automation it will be possible for every woman to vote directly on every issue by means of an electronic voting machine in her house. Since the government is occupied almost entirely with regulating economic affairs and legislating against purely private matters, the elimination of money wand with it the elimination of males who wish to legislate `morality’ will mean there will be practically no issues to vote on.

After the elimination of money there will be no further need to kill men; they will be stripped of the only power they have over psychologically independent females. They will be able to impose themselves only on the doormats, who like to be imposed on. The rest of the women will be busy solving the few remaining unsolved problems before planning their agenda for eternity and Utopia — completely revamping educational programs so that millions of women can be trained within a few months for high level intellectual work that now requires years of training (this can be done very easily once out educational goal is to educate and not perpetuate an academic and intellectual elite); solving the problems of disease and old age and death and completely redesigning our cities and living quarters. Many women will for a while continue to think they dig men, but as they become accustomed to female society and as they become absorbed in their projects, they will eventually come to see the utter uselessnes and banality of the male.

The few remaining men can exist out their puny days dropped out on drugs or strutting around in drag or passively watching the high-powered female in action, fulfilling themselves as spectators, vicarious livers*[FOOTNOTE: It will be electronically possible for him to tune into any specific female he wants to and follow in detail her every movement. The females will kindly, obligingly consent to this, as it won’t hurt them in the slightest and it is a marvelously kind and humane way to treat their unfortunate, handicapped fellow beings.] or breeding in the cow pasture with the toadies, or they can go off to the nearest friendly suicide center where they will be quietly, quickly, and painlessly gassed to death.

Prior to the institution of automation, to the replacement of males by machines, the male should be of use to the female, wait on her, cater to her slightest whim, obey her every command, be totally subservient to her, exist in perfect obedience to her will, as opposed to the completely warped, degenerate situation we have now of men, not only not only not existing at all, cluttering up the world with their ignominious presence, but being pandered to and groveled before by the mass of females, millions of women piously worshiping the Golden Calf, the dog leading the master on a leash, when in fact the male, short of being a drag queen, is least miserable when his dogginess is recognized — no unrealistic emotional demands are made of him and the completely together female is calling the shots. Rational men want to be squashed, stepped on, crushed and crunched, treated as the curs, the filth that they are, have their repulsiveness confirmed.

The sick, irrational men, those who attempt to defend themselves against their disgustingness, when they see SCUM barrelling down on them, will cling in terror to Big Mama with her Big Bouncy Boobies, but Boobies won’t protect them against SCUM; Big Mama will be clinging to Big Daddy, who will be in the corner shitting in his forceful, dynamic pants. Men who are rational, however, won’t kick or struggle or raise a distressing fuss, but will just sit back, relax, enjoy the show and ride the waves to their demise.

– end –

first published here: http://www.womynkind.org/scum.htm

Technological appliances seem neutral. But in reality they are not because they have a purpose. In effect, if they are used, they make an indelible impact on consciousness. Thus, they also make the user dependent: dominated, cretinized, infantilized, and tied to the stake of alienation. However, if appliances are not used, they deteriorate, rust, are infested with ants, or otherwise simply disappear from consciousness. In a similar sense, all technological artifacts divide humans into users and non-users. Those who advocate their use will not hesitate to use their technological weapons of destruction and war in order to dominate those who have no contact with technology. That is how it has been, and that is how it is now.

Technology also divides through its domesticating effect. People work in order to buy electronic appliances or other articles that promote technology, or simply to have access to the services offered by technology that generally promise entertainment or comfort, as well as increased capacity to perform certain actions (to fly, for example, from one continent to another, to paste documents on a word processor, to use a video camera to record daily events with or to document police brutality in order to denounce it). Technology mediates human relations. It drives to insanity, isolates or connects, giving a common cultural reference to many people who talk, live and communicate by and through technological culture. In this way, reality and the world homogenize themselves in accordance with the different programs of the standardizing agenda. This uniformity is reinforced by the clear-cutting of forests, the construction of malls, racial profiling, and so on and so forth. Technology intervenes in all of these processes, which would not be possible without the accelerated destruction of the environment. This seems inarguable: technology is an apparatus one uses, throws away, forgets or never has access to. Technology alienates. Technology consumes and mediates human life. But technology is also a form of approximation of reality filtered by a functional mental module that arises in ideology. This is technological reason.

The sieve that separates the subject from its surroundings and bursts the cocoon of consciousness constructs human rationality. The stagnation of reason in its instrumental practices develops the technological filter. And this petrifies consciousness. Consciousness has an immediate effect that affects other consciousnesses, producing a general or social consciousness. In this way, there are no isolated consciousnesses, because when one interacts with another, the consciousness of both is modified, altering, at the same time, global consciousness.

Technological reason has made consciousness begin to standardize itself, standardizing everything simultaneously. In order to self-peculiarize—and also peculiarize everything—and to create a better understanding of totality and the self, it is necessary to steer consciousness toward aesthetic reason. In an aesthetic reality, all the possibilities of the imagination would open, and social consciousness would be created in a way that is distinct from the blind and bewildering way it is stimulated by mass society. This would lead to the re-establishment of social relationships by way of the logical and analogical reasoning that already exists in every peculiarity of nature. In order to do so, it is fundamental that we give loose rein to our being and let it express itself in the perennial present as a simple aesthetic expression. Every peculiarity shines with its own light in its meeting with every other being that connects with all and with life.

“I hate Aryan Kaganof! I hate that stupid book we did together. I’m mad!!!”
Andile Mngxitama, face book comment.

From a place of blackness? Which place, other than the unending bottomless abyss ? What place other than the arid zone of depressing non-placeness? What is place-like about the ‘place of blackness’ – doesn’t this very phrase, in its standard poise rob itself of placement, much like the infinite darkness before creation – absolute nothingness? Something is agonizing about blackness, it’s definition in the world, as that which is sucked to invisibility by the displacing parasitic presence of whiteness. In an anti-black world, the lived experience of black people emanates the problem of not so much ‘difference’ but cancelation – it isn’t of not the same being, but a reality that narrates not at all being. Which says that, instead of groping for a grammar of ‘possibility and contingency’ as analytical tools of understanding this implicit place of blackness, one has to gather courage to accept that the paradigm shifts and insists on the ‘impossible and structural’.

First to be a ‘nigger’ is to lack the possibility of gathering specks of existential aptitude, as our entire ‘place’ of being is of displacement – being merely feasible in the cartographic layout as “a being of the captor”. A people’s existence marked by the symbolic meaning extracted from the allegories of captivity, colonization, apartheid and neo-colony. What is potentially named a black place is always-already foreclosed and tainted by the signifying presuppositions of inherent attributions to niggerness’ – scandal to ontology . It is a bottomless abyss where everything is noise, yawning gap and primordial chaos . One then is tempted to argue further and say that this ‘place’, if polluted by connotations of blackness, is itself an unfathomable terrain without the gravity of place – ‘a fated place where fated Black bodies are domiciled’ . Consider from this revealing response by a character called Trevor in Incognegro: “No” said Trevor, “we’re terrorists. It’s not a term I’m ashamed of, for the simple reason that I don’t give a damn what the world thinks. I don’t even care what my parents think or don’t think – they are white. That’s what we mean when we say ‘the world’” .

If black people imply this scandalous position, their place implies ipso facto a ‘zone of nonbeing’ – white people are paradigmatically not even at a distance, but totally out of black horizons as it were – worldly beings. Trevor’s admittance to this nonetheless isn’t a way that marks or absolves him from the inimical anti-blackness inherent in his skin. Frank Wilderson III admits ‘no slave is in the world’. To think of the the logic of the post 1994 situation, what Frank Wilderson III calls the ‘taciturn historical moment’ , anti blackness conceals itself through a myriad of raceless speculations, which permit a sanitary narrative of the moment.

What we often hear both from narcissistic charlatans and so-called ‘kaffir lover’ whities, about the race question either suspends white culpability, normalizes suffering by depoliticizing the current life or propose sameness – all for a satanic retention of ‘white corporeal integrity’. The deafening cry of white victimhood, without even accounting for historical dispossessions, is evil: whites are happy in their so-called ‘oppression’, to misuse Marx’s rebuttal on bourgeois alienation. The problems still implicated on the black body will be scandals that this raceless “contemporary critical discourse neither acknowledge nor discourse away” . One has to quote Jared Sexton and Huey Copeland here at length:

“For it is that very function which contemporary racial theory more often than not seeks to leap over, in the process revealing its own ineffectuality, a kind of willful blindness that cannot be overstated. In its single minded capacity to concentrate on everything except which matters most in the restricting of white supremacy, such theory is undoubtedly egregious than intellectual faux pas or public disservice. It is a modality of complicity, or better, fraud.”

To think therefore of this book (From a place of blackness), one is mired by a series of immobilizing questions, those that squat in its belly – here Andile Mngxitama and Aryan Kaganof bare the brutality of the race question; instead of valorizing dialogue, the new constituent element of the hypocritical cuteness of the rainbow kak, they send us walking through the agonizing pitch of burning coal. Mngxitama assumes his role as Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son: ‘Every desire, every dream, no matter how intimate or personal, is a plot or a conspiracy. Every hope is a plan for insurrection. Every glance of the eye is a threat. His very existence is a crime against the state!’ Whilst Kaganof is the Trevor Gardener in Frank Wilderson’s Incognegro: ‘to the world I am terrorist – an albino terrorist’. They both agree that there is no possible comradeship between whites and blacks: their affair is “irreconcilable, non-communicative”, as Wilderson III would put it. The entry point that, when ‘whites appeared, blacks disappeared’ foregrounds and compels the discussion to accept the gulf. It begs us concede to the benumbing reality of blacks and whites’ situation as always already that of utter depletion, sutured by their respective irreconcilability.

Dialogue is primarily a cul-de-sac, of trying to either reach consensus by watering down the possibility of a rupture or negotiation over nebulous ideas that seek to dissuade the fact of South African reality. Here, in this pseudo dialogue as it were, Mngxitama and Kaganof accept that what could be given credence as a place of departure, is in fact the very antic of preserving dispersion, securing and obscuring the temerity of white violence to still cloud and detect chant of black cries. Isn’t this the anguishing tale of the new social movements today, whose respective enunciatory speech as Heinrich Bohmke opines, is that of white supremacy as an ‘organizing discourse’ ? The violence of whiteness nonetheless cannot be simply observed in the simplistic often obvious dexterities of post 1994 missionaries/leftists, who speak the language of human rights, Lewis R Gordon’s exoticists who ‘desire the forbidden fruit’ . We must go beyond, I think, to those who pose real questions, like when Costas Duozinas asks provocatively who is the “human” of Human Rights or even the classical performances of John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me. These are a step ahead from the monotonous decrepitude of colorblind activists. Didn’t someone reply to Griffin’s masochistic Leon Schuster’s miss-en-scene, painting himself black to show how racist whites are: at least you can wipe off your paint!? Can’t this very question be posed to what is happening here – the pseudo dialogue also, be flipped on its head; the truth being that Aryan Kaganof IS actually speaking alone? Isn’t it to some relative level the violence of white supremacy feasible even when white folks bewail the line of antagonism, cursing his very zone of existence, like Trevor Gardener? Doesn’t this sacrifice, in its ‘well meaningfulness’ also accrue and legitimate the very core of white signifying (virtue, all good) and that by its ‘radicality’ stands to absorb and validate that what the blacks are saying is ‘true’? Aren’t you reminded of the beauty of the white man who took white narcissism scoops, as ‘the repenting perpetrator’ after attempting to kill Rev Frank Chikane?

If we accept these points, we must move to a point that says, actually – there is indeed no dialogue here – in fact this is not even Andile Mngxitama’s book. The saddening thing about these kinds of situation is that the black voice, as said above, is sucked to absence by the parasitic presence of whiteness. Achille Mbembe admits to a similar futility about black combative discourses attempting to refute the West’s negative attitude about Africa:

“The harshness of such a diagnosis may surprise. But it must not be forgotten that, almost universally, the simplistic and narrow prejudice persists that African social formations belong to a specific category, that of simple societies or of traditional societies. That such a prejudice has been emptied of all substance by recent criticism seems to make absolutely no difference; the corpse obstinately persists in getting again every time it is buried and, year in year out, everyday language and much ostensibly scholarly writing remain largely in thrall to its presuppositions”

So by way of concluding, let me end off with a small anecdote. I was once debating with a friend (black) at Tagores about race and Mbembe, until I got angry and left him: fucking stupid prick, I murmured. He later came outside to meet with me, where I was standing chatting to another friend (white). He asked her how come she was talking with such a racist, but with a hint of a smile implying he’s just joking. She replied, as it were confirming the argument we’d been having inside: are you one of those colorblind darkies? He couldn’t breathe, he was startled by the vulgarity of his futile premise. This could be said about the same thing about this book. Andile Mngxitama’s position as known (racists, extremist, fundamentalist etc) sabotages the very fabric of the ‘new’ dispensation, his anti-people hogwash – but I am tempted to say, only with Kaganof’s validation is Andile’s politics going to resound, given credibility and sense. It is only when white people concede that they are fucking up black people’s lives that most people will assume their ‘place’. So in relative fact, the very voice of anti-blackness, through its myriad reproductions, still gives itself credibility even in trying to make us fight back. As the black consciousness refusal adage says: they kick us and then tell us how to respond to the kick!

Athi Mongezeleli Joja