Promissory Notes:

From Crisis to Commons

Midnight Notes and Friends

The bullet that pierced Alexis’s heart was not a random

bullet shot from a cop’s gun to the body of an ‘indocile’

kid. It was the choice of the state to violently impose submission

same,” written and distributed December 2008 in Greece.

Crisis: What it is, What it is not

After five hundred years of existence, capitalists are once again

announcing to us that their system is in crisis. They are urging

everyone to make sacrifices to save its life. We are told that if we

do not make these sacrifices, we together face the prospect of a

mutual shipwreck. Such threats should be taken seriously. Already

in every part of the planet, workers are paying the price of the crisis

in retrenchment, mass unemployment, lost pensions, foreclosures,

and death.

To make the threats more biting, there are daily reminders that

we are in an era when our rights are everywhere under attack and

the world’s masters will spare no atrocity if the demanded sacrifices

are refused. The bombs dropped on the defenseless population of

Gaza have been exemplary in this regard. They fall on all of us, as

they lower the bar of what is held to be a legitimate response in the

face of resistance. They amplify a thousand-fold the murderous intent

behind the Athenian policeman’s fatal bullet fired into the body

of Alexis Grigoropoulos in early December of 2008 (described in

the epigraph above).

On all sides there is a sense that we are living in apocalyptic

times. How did this “end-of-times” crisis develop, and what does it

signify for anti-capitalist/social justice movements seeking to understand

possible paths out of capitalism? This pamphlet is a contribution

to the debate on these questions that is growing ever more intense

as the crisis deepens and the revolutionary possibilities of our time

open up. We write it in an attempt to penetrate the smokescreen now

surrounding this crisis that makes it very difficult to devise responses

and to anticipate the next moves capital will make. All too often,

even within the Left, explanations of the crisis take us to the rarified

stratosphere of financial circuits and dealings, or the tangled, intricate

knots of hedge-funds/derivatives operations—that is, they take us to

a world that is incomprehensible to most of us, detached from any

struggles people are making, so that it becomes impossible to even

conceptualize any forms of resistance to it.

δείτε όλο το κείμενο εδώ http://www.midnightnotes.org/Promissory%20Notes.pdf