1. Looting as one of the fine arts

Wednesday 1st of December, the eternal guardians of misery, putting on ritual display the false opposition, suffered a heavy blow. In less than an hour a group of daring mutineers ruined all pretensions of the congregation of papier-mâché subversives that was occurring and put light on the misery of the lamentable and disgraceful student environment, making some show themselves for their true colors: apprentice seminar speakers of inquisitors and mercenary police.

The ridiculous protest-procession had occurred exactly as predicted: order and boredom ruled until the end. When the protest dissolved, some four-hundred people remained at the gates of the University. It was then that a group of around thirty people started the ruckus, breaking in a positive manner the suspicious peace that could be felt, declaring war on misery in all its forms and on all of its representatives; from setting fire to a garbage can to the wrecking of some cars it moved on to setting fire to a parked van with propaganda of the municipal campaign against AIDS1 . They didn’t lack motives: in the current phase of internationalization and homogenization of the Market’s domination, what doesn’t stop being internationalized are its taming methods; AIDS, born in the labs or in the African jungle – we don’t so much care about its origin as we do about its use -, fought as any other disease by stupid reformists with or without State subsidies, has revealed itself as the most modern International Taming System, presenting the State and Capital (supreme beneficiaries and organizers of sexual misery) as the supreme saviors of Humanity. It’s against the provocateur appearance that the authors of these “acts of vandalism” acted. Curiously, it was those that are unsatisfied with their safe, but monotonous sexual life with an eternal partner that were astonished.

After this, the robbers proceeded to loot and setting fire to the monument to the Market’s omnipresence situated in the campus’ entrance. Which consists of a bank (from which after expulsing the employees, was robbed of 300.000 ptas.), a deposit for expendable materials (now more expendable than ever), an information office for the students and a travel agency. Thus contributing in their own way to the critic of the ridiculous organized trips. If University students like to celebrate their academic success basking in contemplation of the misery exhibited all over the planet, the “1st of December vandals” had to fight against it in their own city (after all internationalism starts at home); if the “adventure” of organized trips has extended itself as if a biblical plague, it’s because it needs to fill the void left by the loss of the adventure of life2 . In case there was still any doubt that they were uncontrollable and that they didn’t desire to be controlled by any intellectual, bureaucratic process or frontier; they destroyed and fucked up all the data on the control of people that was archived there as well as telephone conversations, computers, glass, furniture, etc. with an estimation of damages on a modest, yet pretty, 2.000.000 ptas. (pesetas).

The average person will only see in these acts of destruction a celebration of madness, irrationality and nihilism. The rats of the press only saw destruction in the destruction, enjoying themselves with a bereaved description of them; the economists were moved by the amount of losses. Consequently this noble world, filled with rational and responsible people, has contributed to prevent people from understanding that what took place was a critic by action of the misery of life itself, accompanied by the violence which they were so quick to classify as “gratuitous” only because they know how expensive it can be to them. All of these secular priests that preach the humanism of the Market (authentic merchants of humanity) comes the supreme inhumanity in the destruction of the objects whose production sacrifices millions of lives every day, but no inhumanity in the permanent sacrifice demanded for the perpetuation of the holy cause of the Divine Economy, that keeps being today more than ever the complete denial of Man.

As such, a reduced number of “uncontrollable” – they were unanimously baptized as such by the craftsmen of social control, such as the press and the parties that know perfectly well that it reflects their failure – managed to invert the meaning of the day: what was supposed to be a day of triumph for the guardians of social peace and the unanimous exaltation of the spirit of democratic unity in the student movement, converted to a day that ended on a note of social war and the division into two clearly outlined and irreconcilably opposing factions.

Thus nobody can be surprised that a group of students led by members of the Students’ Union3 assumed the defense of the harassed institutions as proper action. For the glory of local patriots it was an idiot flying the Aragonese flag that put himself in charge of raising the moral of this weak and improvised attempt to restore order: “People, be you from private or public schooling, or from the Union, we need to form a block and kick them out, if we’re few they’ll beat us, but together we can beat them”. It was obvious that once the Market and its mediators are denied, once liberated from the jailers of the mind, they had to face the police of “good citizens”: when tedium and boredom dissipate, only the police force can end the real communication that propagates. Since they weren’t being civilized by the lies, they had to be suppressed by force; but at that place there wasn’t a force capable of stopping them. The sad replacement for an anti-disturbs force was quickly dispersed by the rocks frown by the mutineers. Onlookers that had adopted the cadaveric position of “first hand spectator of serious events”4 suffered the same fate.

Since we’ve mentioned these civilian clothed police, we might as well explain why the uniformed police officers cannot enter a campus without permission from the dean, to great embarrassment and derision of the university’s pigs: it’s simply the case of maintaining the illusion of a real struggle between students, giving them a space, limited by the authorities, in which to “play revolution” once in a while. As students are the ones to be locked there, there’s nothing to fear, because the culture that they adore so much and have entrenched in them is nothing but a bunch of policed ideas, as it was once again demonstrated.

• 1If certain sexual practices could previously be conducted outside of the Market, the Society of the Spectacle, taking another step towards the full commodification of our needs, succeeded in making the communication/affection inseparable from these activities to be mediated by the Market. What do you want, it’s progress…From now on every rise in the price of condoms will mean a greater number of obstacles in communication. Let’s once again highlight this act that is so full of sense.
• 2Capital and its miseries have spread to the point of making it impossible to find a space that hasn’t been colonized by it. And the scarce spaces that haven’t directly been colonized are done so by an expeditionary force of explorers: tourists. Since they pay to see, it is seen from the perspective of the Market: thus the most remote of mountains should be one of the most valuable commodities. Just like everything King Midas touched converted into gold, the current rulers of the World can’t see anything without turning it into an object of trade or barter.
• 3Declaration from one of these pieces of trash on the radio: “If the police doesn’t do its job, then we’ll have to do it ourselves”.
• 4The powers so far have always had the condition that the dominated contemplate their luck as something “natural”. In the Society of the Spectacle the general contemplation is the form assumed by the poor. The onlookers at riots, that incarnate the most completed of miseries, were in turn treated without contemplations: and consequently the struggle against poverty is carried out.