Just to preface : This website is a relatively safe and independent corner of the internet. Also, it is mine. But also yours ! As anything in this capitalist society, it has an ideology, and it is a product. But we can always rebel a bit…

Entries (Table of contents) :

• Introduction
  • Marx and the matrix
    • Sustainable web
    • Digital freedom and responsibility
    • About the uniqueness of the human individual (experience)
    • The necessity of serving the collective purpose, and a higher moral system
    • On the nature of labour
    • Human nature doesn’t exist, at best, it transforms itself
    • The decentralized web, a dream come true
    • Our right to privacy, in order to be more open
    • Everything is crackeable, including this website
    • Why be happy when you could be interesting ?
    • Gender is an experience
    • For my comrades : On dogma and anti-revisionism
    • On Revolution and the virtue of the masses
  • The One and the many
  • Ode to Jacques Ellul

Introduction

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

About myself (you will never get into my brain!):
There are many things I believe in, I am a symphony of roughly related chapters, co-existing and pointing at each other. I was, like many, forged by hardship and warm encounters alike. With friends, family, acquaintances, strangers, and God. This website exists for a way to know myself, to share it, and to gather some things from you.

I am not very good at talking about myself. Simply because I undervalue the interest it has for the listener. I don’t believe anybody is unique. We are social constructs. The soul is a whole other subject. I am nevertheless somewhat egoistic. I prefer talking about how I view the world, and what I intend to do about it. (And I often don’t do what I say…) I sometimes often believe I am right. But I don’t like to sound arrogant, so my egoism pushes me to be humble. It’s an interesting game I play with myself. I play all kinds of games with other people, we are all somewhat psycopathic while equally being balanced by true altruism. I don’t subscribe to the idea of Human Nature. And again, the soul is a whole other subject that you may read on through my Theology posts.

I am not equal to myself, rather I am in constant movement. I believe I will always be jittery, bouncy and never sure of myself. I easily commit in a headlong rush, but to this blog it is not as much of a commitment as it is a commitment to myself.

Now, with this whole mess out of the way… I could tell you one thing. I subscribe to values. I live through the world with them and they participate in my growth as an individual. (Moral) values have no purpose if you live in the wild : you need to test these on someone (will they be angry if I steal their food?). Therefore, my values are my tools with which I interact with the world. That’s all I will say for now. I have no more justifications, descriptions. Let’s be curious of one another, it is absurd to reveal everything about ourselves to total strangers.

About you :
This manifesto, though, is a way for me to make some sense out of the intention, motive and scope of this website, the same way I do about my own life, because it is not merely a personal blog, but my own individual world on the internet to be shared across. You should do it too !

“In a traditional German toilet, the hole into which shit disappears after we flush is right at the front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is at the back, i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as quickly as possible. Finally, the American (Anglo-Saxon) toilet presents a synthesis, a mediation between these opposites: the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected. […] It is clear that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: each involves a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to excrement. Hegel was among the first to see in the geographical triad of Germany, France and England an expression of three different existential attitudes: reflective thoroughness (German), revolutionary hastiness (French), utilitarian pragmatism (English). In political terms, this triad can be read as German conservatism, French revolutionary radicalism and English liberalism. […] The point about toilets is that they enable us not only to discern this triad in the most intimate domain, but also to identify its underlying mechanism in the three different attitudes towards excremental excess: an ambiguous contemplative fascination; a wish to get rid of it as fast as possible; a pragmatic decision to treat it as ordinary and dispose of it in an appropriate way. It is easy for an academic at a round table to claim that we live in a post-ideological universe, but the moment he visits the lavatory after the heated discussion, he is again knee-deep in ideology.”

Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies

(I haven’t read the book yet, but Zizek is cool)

Marx and the matrix

Sustainable web

The internet is like any place, though it is virtual, it is social. It can be bought, rented, invaded, privatized…etc. This website follows a simple route : to provide a personal place to share, built through sustainable design principles. Sustainability is a broad socio-philosophical concept that can both be claimed by the right or the left, it doesn’t matter : it is as unprecise as it is rightfully close to reality.

The internet is a duplicata of the material societal sphere, built by and through capitalism and imperialism. Cities, countryside, mines, resorts… all of these entities constitue a geographical reality. The internet is made of websites, webapps, domains, forums, databases… and your data!. There is no place that capitalism can’t colonize. Though, this website is not exempt from that; the same way a worker co-op is not socialism, but a partial pocket thereof, this website is not capitalist insofar as I am a communist. I try to have a thorough and mindful political practice through my every movement. (I pay a corporation to host this website, I have a computer made by an evil company… > Why are you a communist if you have an iphone ? < Why are you a cunt if you don’t have one ?)

Therefore, the building method of this website modestly tries to support : environmental sustainability, digital minimalism, non-profit, accessibility and openness. These are broad concepts that anyone can take for themselves, they’re all broadly rooted in Humanism.

(If you wanted to summarize my personal ideology, it could be akin to a trifecta : Pre-modern humanism -> The French Revolution & Utopian socialism -> Karl Marx and everything thereafter. ) The idea is to put this ideology in best practice on the web. Nothing is perfect.

Digital freedom and responsibility

It sucks. Every shitty website asks for your cookies (yummy), you buy a NordVPN subscription but it probably keeps your logs and data, you’re hooked on your phone, so am I… you want an alternative.

Sorry people, web3 is not digital freedom. Just like AI, it is an economic bubble. Did you know in 1900, in the US, there were about 2000 car companies ? Yeah. Most were probably rubbish, because a few decades ago, there were only 4. Also because capitalism likes monopoly and rubbish. There are so many ‘new and innovative’ web3 products (dapps?) and AI tools because we are experiencing a hype circle known as an economic bubble (which will eventually burst)

The internet is like a huge shitty american city with abusive airconditioned malls, shitty little houses made out of cardboard and trillion lane roads. It is bare of humanity, it is bland, and altogether barbaric and backward. I am not saying web3 is not the answer to this web2 corporate shit. But it has a long way to go.

Most AI is trash, most crypto is trash. Most things are trash actually. Humans aren’t though. You are what you eat! Don’t eat trash…

Anyways. Digital freedom, like any freedom, comes at a cost : thinking, doing, organizing, designing radically different things. The free homo sapiens is shaped and fleshed out, not given. Freedom comes from an environment bare of constraints but of the ones we allow to set for ourselves.

Attaining digital freedom is like trying to swat a fly that keeps coming to lick your skin. Unless you wear a coat at all times, you’ll just get tired and frustrated.

Don’t worry, we’ll get there.

But ultimately, it comes to your responsibility to take action on shaping your personal experience. Yes, there is systemic oppression, blabla. We’ll get rid of that. Get rid of what makes you become a wilted flower. Drink some water!!!

In a time where our cellphones constantly emit waves to anything it can hold on, where information is omnipresent, sold, bought, twisted, it is normal to become crazy. We feel overwhelmed, submerged, constantly under attack. Peace is a luxury. Take it one step at a time… once again : Enjoy, take some tea, relax... you had a hard day.

About the uniqueness of the human individual (experience)

Both Traditional idealism and Traditional materialism (even marxist orthodoxy besides maybe this or that) can’t really make sense of human individual experiences after Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind. If we want to be even more annoying, Existentialism can’t even do that. It is at least good that we can surpass beyond Aristotelicism and use the wonders of Hegelian Dialectics. I could not really even try to simplify the issue here, simply put : the human experience is even more complex and untameable than the nature of observable reality. And it is precisely a valuable thing to respect and consider as a matter. Even though true freedom is to be built at a social level, as a system enforcing its possibility of existence, personal and individual freedom matters more.

The digital experience is a twofold object : to have a pleasurable experience and to learn. As long as we can make it an experience devoid of consumption, it will not be a market, and our human experience will remain authentic. Even digital minimalism is a fraud.

Make your own experience, by your own means, with your own goals. Be your own master.

The necessity of serving the collective purpose, and a higher moral system

No, I am not of these who say “No God, No master!”. My belief is that our personal and collective moral and political practice should define, deconstruct and rid itself of ideology. It is a necessary and constitutive element of our humanity, so much so that I am not advocating for no ideology, but for the anihilation of ideology from our moral and political practice thereof.

Freely and wholeheartedly choosing to define our own existence, and where it is headed firstly demands for us to deconstruct the system that defines it. It commodified us, so let’s commodify it : it is not the sole and only reality we can breathe and taste, it is like anything, a construct.

Postmodernism cannot successfuly attempt to pick apart reality in so much as everything that touches it becomes some hyper-idealistic nonsense. Our eyeglass onto the world will remain of dialectical materialist fabric.

All I’m saying is that : We are systematic, social and constructed creatures. Let’s just build the future we want. Live in a cave in the wild if you want, I won’t spit at you, quite the contrary. And we are a pretty good species at that. But it won’t rid ourselves of poverty, famine and war.

Don’t be good because it follows a system, be good because you want to be good.

On the nature of labour

Labour cannot be a ubiquitous thing. Bourgeois economists agree : of the trifecta of wealth production, labour is the third (alongside capital and land). To that we say : Labour is at the core of production itself. (Until we get replaced by robots…)

As we discussed previously, the individual experience (not the individual itself) is unique and valuable. Labour shares value with our individual experience as much as it destroys us. In the fashion of situationists and related creatures mindlessly stating “Abolish labour!“, reactionaries and fascists will state “Work for the nation!“, in any case they both essentialise labour by disregarding its material essence :

“Labor is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates and controls the material reactions between himself and Nature…by thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway.“

Marx, Capital I, 1867

Basically, what we mean here is that : Labour that is not alienating is liberating. Whence leftists will say labour is the cause of man’s demise, or state, or money…etc. They will just essentialise these forces, making them false enemies. It is the socio-economic system in which labour is commodified that makes it the demise of man.

You could even argue communism is much more an attempt at reforming labour through revolution (thereby deconstructing the preexistent system to construct a new one) than to reform social reality – it poses itself as a prerequisite to reform labour itself. Simply because communism is a reshaping of the framework and rapports of production.

Human nature doesn’t exist, at best, it transforms itself

Human nature doesn’t exist, at best, it shapes itself differently through each mode of production. In slave society, feudalism and capitalism, the nature of man has always been of serving a role. Each category, each role we fall into automatically includes social responsibility and a whole structural culture made to legitimize and preserve these roles. You have one role that gives you two choices : to fight the superstructures defining your role, in order to a) define your own role b) define the society that fits the role you set for yourself.

Nature is contained in man insofar as labour changes man’s own nature. Nature is not an essence, it is a rapport between man and itself. On natural being : “In fact it is nature, in its integral being in-itself, that is to provide both ontological preparation and basis for the development of man , society, and history.” The Ontology of Social Being, 1 Hegel, Gyorgy Lukàcs

In very rough words, you could say it is nature that designed Social Being, Mankind. But the very idea of Social Being makes it so that Man is ontologically seperate from Nature. And superstructural frameworks have been the best at that : Reducing Man to natural being. Thereby our emotions, our purpose, our desires, our framework of mind is conditioned and unseperable from its commodified natural essence. This is how Human Nature came to be, shaped as a role ( or roles, depending or hierarchies) and legitimized through rationalist philosophy.

When you say of a woman that “she is angry because of her hormones acting up” you are reducing an individual to a commodified natural entity – and of course these hormones have an impact, but it is not what defines a woman. We are neither wolves or she-wolves.

Nature gives place to society, but society is not conditioned by nature insofar as society conditions itself whence it becomes a system (a totality). Once someone declares “Man is a social being”, human nature collapses.

The decentralided web, a dream come true

Let us not consider web3, or the decentralised web as a natural occuring factor, stemming from our forces of production (technology). It is as much rooted in a) a socio-philosophical concept as b) a structure and system and c) an ideological concept (marketing).

Decentralisation is substantially and precisely libertarian. As much as libertarianism branches out and comes to be claimed by the left, it is undeniable that it is rooted in liberalism : the political philosophy of the Englightenment.

The idea now is for whom is this decentralisation for ? Which interests does it serve ? if forces are delegated to smaller factions, which power do they hold ?

The idea of the blockchain is good. I would not be short of timid to even say it is even revolutionary in some sense. Though, privacy, protocol and tech aside : the economics of it cannot shy themselves away : the one who holds the most bitcoin is the biggest player in town. Insofar as a cryptocurrency, or any asset for that matter is a product commidified and traded through an open market ; decentralized or not, it will remain capitalist. I might be wrong, but even if one comes to regulate and flesh out some tokenomics that promote socialist values, it would either be unattractive (financially) or easily revertible to open market principles.

We can either uphold decentralized solutions that don’t include monetary exchange, the idea simply is emancipating ourselves from Big Tech. This kind of techno-feudalism, even if put in rough and naive terms, is a substantial reality we have to face. The alternative to it can only as much of an attempt at trying other things – inasmuch as we seriously need an alternative to capitalism.

In addition, it is very important to adress the fact that decentralization or centralization is not an issue to impute Capitalism. It is strictly an issue of power and of the state. And it is precisely my perspective that it is merely a tool rather an end – and one of which contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union. The state ate the nation from inside – to quote one of our great uncles :

“The proletariat seizes from state power and turns the means of production into state property to begin with. But thereby it abolishes itself as the proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and class antagonisms, and abolishes also the state as state. Society thus far, operating amid class antagonisms, needed the state, that is, an organization of the particular exploiting class, for the maintenance of its external conditions of production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited class in the conditions of oppression determined by the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom or bondage, wage-labor). The state was the official representative of society as a whole, its concentration in a visible corporation.“

The State and Revolution, Vladimir Illich Lenin

Even though Lenin’s analysis of the state as a necessary instrument of the communist party during the dictatorship of the proletariat is sound, it calls for political practice to be as sound (a proletarian state backed by the organised masses). The complexity of the scientific nature of the state cannot be summarized here, as I am not very knowledgeable of this, and the debate (a very interesting and valuable one) is still ongoing (and more people are coming to chime in).

What I will say is this : decentralized or centralized state is not blind to oppression. A decentralized, free, private and open-source internet, as good as it sounds, can be fabricated in so many ways that we ultimately will never have control over – Web3 is not a new concept or philosophy, though it gives a new paintcoat to an old one, it is just a new technological infrastructure.

…

Our right to privacy, in order to be more open

“Ultimately, arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”

Edward Snowden

Everything is crackable, including this website

It is not impossible that someone, someday, will know my identity. And it is not an issue, I don’t use my real name and face simply because it is not relevant to the content I create and share. You can crack at me, actually you can crack at anything. Whether it be through sticks, bombs, harrasment, kidnapping… The system is cracking at you in so many smart ways, (we)you can also crack it ! The idea is to not be constantly paranoid and unnecessarily vigilant. The idea is to be consistently responsible and mindful of one’s actions. Do not throw your mental health out the window. You should still have enough to afford peace of mind.

Why be happy when you could be interesting ?

Happiness is not a purpose : it is only the opposite of Pain. Dialectically speaking, nobody searches for pain as much as nobody searches for happiness. Personal development gurus and eastern philosophy shenanigans have often told us either one of these : do something that makes you happy, or embrace the pain.

Neither of these are correct, they essentialise and reduce our being to a natural shell of itself. We only search to make sense out of our existence and to make it worthwhile, insofar as making this existence bearable and concrete. Substantially, happiness is a state of mind, and it cannot even scratch the surface of being a state of being (the soul).

The end mark of the pursuit of meaning is ultimately bliss, to be without contradiction, to be bare of internal conflicts : it is as much borrowed from eastern philosophy than western philosophy. But it is true insofar as it tackles the complexity of the human experience. Dialectics is completely useful here : insofar as reason is summoned to tackle the issue. But God knows you cannot tackle life with reason itself, I will not call unto faith, because even though this manifesto is not scientific, it touches on a scientific object : material reality.

Nevertheless, as one surpasses happiness and redefines its role, i.e an unfixed and dynamic state of mind, we can then push the meaning of life to its utmost depths. Of course to me, it is faith (in everything it encompasses), the surpassing of one’s ego and submitting to a higher reality. But this is a subjectively observeable reality. Insofar as science goes (psychology, anthropology and even philosophy), surpassing the ability to endure (Leid, in german) and to appreciate passion or happiness (Leidenschaft, in german) is like standing upright on our rear legs. Basically, Zizek is saying that attempting to establish a lucid, conscious category of substantive happiness is faulty and delusional because you are really chasing the strength of your desire, and the sustainability of that desire as it lingers on some horizon, rather than happiness itself.

Either we reform our sense of desire, or our outlook on it as Nietzsche would put it : “Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.”

Now, it is our purpose to define our own desire.

Gender is an experience

For my comrades : On dogma and anti-revisionism

On Revolution and the virtue of the masses

Once, I said to someone I hold very dearly in my heart, and in a similar fashion, with a relieved but fiery heart :
(Yes I quote myself sometimes, very prideful…) “Armed struggle is deeply rooted in self-defence, beyond Marx’s words, it is evident in practice this way. The desire for peace is stronger than the resort to war, but whence war comes, all of our courage and desire for freedom must be unleashed. Before that, to uphold the ethos of the proletariate is necessary – through education. It is a war in itself, of living and dignity bearing humanity against a class that desires nothing but destruction.“

We as a class would desire deeply to not resort to violence, but we cannot steer our gaze away from the martyrs of Palestine, Rojava, India, Spain, Germany and all of which, are women and men who saw no end to fascism and capitalism than to skewer its evil at the end of their bayonets.

As we have stated, that marxism, and the theory that followed its economic, anthropological and historical analysis of human society, is the most powerful scientific tool known to man : there is also a point to be made about the political ethics and morals of the class which thirsts for justice. It is sure that firstly one should analyze what ailments compete to the injustice of his condition – exploitation, brainwashing, austerity, division… to name a few. Truly, this evil is no more than the total destruction of the spirit of the proletariate in favour of harvesting its materiality. This is fascism, Capitalism’s ending phase. In history, we have seen that economic systems don’t necessarily follow linear dialectical modes of progression. Though I am not sure, at this stage, as to why this happens, namely that one nation can go from socialism to fascism, or from fascism to neoliberalism again…

If these are the depravities of such systems based on class contradiction (or antagonism perhaps, in the case of fascism), we could be so zealous as to say that the masses, in particular the proletariate and peasentry hold different or even antagonistic virtues.

Though it is harder to distinguish them than to analyze their complexity, for it is precisely these virtues that are contradictory and multiple. And also it is drastically important to note that these virtues are doubled by their contradiction which simply are born from bourgeois ideology. Simply on the part that ideology is a brilliant (in its demise) toolkit used to make the state aparatus grow its tentacles, in spirit and in society.

Simply put, the uneducated (uneducated to marxism and its sister theories, anarchism and communalism alike) worker is putting their whole life-purpose in the hands of the capitalist class by subjecting their spirit to their ‘education’ of some sorts; Hence why an indian peasant would love their condition as a poor individual simply because hinduism has been rehashed into the state apparatus’ ideology. At least from my brief (but needing more thorough focus) analysis on the current condition of the indian working class.

I believe, even though this may sound idealist – though it is only an unnecessary varnish that is more helpful to put things in perspective – that class struggle, in its direct defence against the ruling class is also a spiritual war. If one could be even more zealous than to produce a theology of class warfare (yes, even more completely madly psychotic than liberation theology…), they could compare all of these things to Original (or Ancestral) Sin, virtues, redemption and all of these wonderful but seemingly contradictory elements. Though I precisely believe contradictions are always sought to be synthesized, even through the ever-slow process of the perpetual creative dynamic of nature and social being, I also believe Religion (both in the sense of recognition to an idealistic manner of life and the institution of it thereby on earth, in all its social contradictions and positive consequences) and Dialectical materialism are to be synthesized, through an open-face dialogue and a patient view of history and philosophy. It is probably only possible from the point of view of one who is religious but also marxist because it is their sin to bear, their mud to turn into gold. Because countless (and sometimes pointless) atheistic theology analysis of religious system have been done, even in favour of religion, but (as mystical and infuriating as it may sound) religiosity is only to be understood through spiritual practice. That is to say to a lambda marxist, you can only truly understand revolution once you are either in a prison cell or in the trenches with a gun.

To understand, to truly be able to go through this beautiful turmoil that is religious experience and to come back from its trance and write words, which will always ever encapsulate the least of it, it is to truly be a sinner and an aspiring saint at the same time. (I am talking in abrahamic terms, although probably not islamic and I lack the asian eastern perspective to comment on its religious experience). Truly, to be in solace with both, to repent and to ask for Grace, as on a constantly dwindling pendulum seems to me, to be the only true way to see the cosmos and the world as a it is. To be able to be reminded of our human existence and nature and to also be reminded of our godly (potential) nature.

Marxism is one food for the poor that will never satisfy as much as spiritual liberation. To call for the death of the evil rulers of this world is also to love them. To call for the death of our persecutors we must also call for the death of the world.

Now it is the time to unleash the lion who will tend to the lamb. It is time for the work of my life. As humbly as I can, and with discernment.

Now it is time to talk about the Soul of the many, and the Holy Divinity of the One.

Thank you for having read me so far, if you are ready and willing, let us now shift gears for a new destination :

The One and the many

Click here to read more.