Question and Answer
Q. What is the worst thing about news?
A. It is a communications ideology. It assumes that information is significant.
Go tell it to the Chaikovskists. It is all very well going to the people with a feast of facts about Turkish dams, and arms manufacturers and political corruption but what if the peasants run you out of town? People do not respond to news, they do not act on ideas or facts, what they do do in relation to information is respond according to the force that is applied through the information in their lives. Someone sends me a red bill, I must act, it is not the bill that makes me pay but the force behind it. People are not rational in the sense that they weigh up arguments and make decisions on the best ideas but they are rational in the way animals are rational, they act in their own best interest as they perceive it at the time and with the limited powers of their abilities. They respond to the orchestration of news, they cry when this royal dies, they cheer when that team wins but it is not the news that moves them it is the force behind the news, you could say they respond to the amount of capital that has been invested in a message. Imbeciles and anarchists say knowledge is power, but Freud and us say, knowing you’re repressed doesn’t stop you being repressed. MD’s fabulous knowledge of pro-revolutionary history and ideas has not set us free, quite the contrary, it has drawn us into an investigation of why we’re still miserable gits and why our beliefs have no significance in the world, why intentional actions always fail, why so many revolutionaries are arses etc etc. Don’t the working class already know all the facts they need to know about capitalism? Do they really need the literary equivalent of a spotty student telling them about, sorry, ‘showing’ them the plight of distant natives, or the revolutionary potential of veganism? The working class know they are being exploited but they are also getting something in return; as things stand their wages are more real than ideas of social change. It’s no good telling them things could be otherwise because there’s no proof that they could be, and the cost of the struggle against capital must be borne by the workers who have no option but to exist where they are and not by the activists who have chosen the luxury of their struggle. People do not rise up against capital because they lack sufficient facts, they refuse to act, or act as they do act, because that is the best bet as they see it under current conditions. Power is not knowledge, power is power, or put another way, power is force and force is power. Information is only significant if you have the power to acton it, otherwise it is just noise, you tell us America did a bad thing, you say some company uses child labour, too bad and so what? We’re just people, we can’t change anything, we can’t do anything more than anyone else, it is simply beyond us, and so much of the radical press is so ‘disempowering’ with their offering up of bare-faced facts about bad things happening that makes you want to turn into a reformist (eg., charity worker) to get things done, better not to know anything. The specifics of news always draws a response to the symptoms of capitalism and not capitalism itself as a cause.
The working class bury their heads, that’s good, they might see the root of things.
It is not the knowledge a news item brings that is significant but the force it carries behind it. For example the news content in the single word, ‘strike’ is only a pinpoint but it carries behind it the weight of a thousand gravities and attracts to it the force of many others but it is no good naively calling for a strike, people aren’t prepared to risk themselves on something that isn’t happening yet. The strike must be the event, the reality that has already happened and continues to happen and to which we must respond. The actions of the anti-capitalists for example and in contrast are not real and therefore call forth no response except within the pro-rev milieu. Only the news of our own destruction is really news, all the rest is nosey-parkerism.
The precondition of revolution is not more information but real events to which the world must respond, and only forces create real events. It is precisely force that we as a milieu do not have, and never will. The working class has force but it acts in response to the capitalist organisation of the world and not to the holy exhortations of unwashed prophets. We are saying here that capitalism, and the working class which is one of capital’s ambiguous forces, dictates when and if the revolution will come.
