THE ANARCHO-PRIMITIVIST RACKET

Quotations from 'On Organization'' by Jacques Camatte.
Since the essence of politics is fundamentally representation, each group is forever trying to project an impressive image on the social screen. The groups are always explaining how they represent themselves in order to be recognized by certain people as the vanguard for representing others, the class. [page 20]

Not only does the state hire itself out to gangs, but it becomes a gang (racket) itself. [page 24]

We can see the same sort of transformation in the political sphere. The central committee of a party or the centre of any sort of regroupment plays the same role as the state. Democratic centralism only managed to mimic the parliamentary form characteristic of formal domination. [p 25]

It follows that all forms of working class political organization have disappeared. In their place, gangs confront one another in an obscene competition, veritable rackets rivaling each other in what they peddle, but identical in their essence. [p 26]

In its external relations, the political gang tends to mask the existence of the clique, since it must seduce in order to recruit. It adorns itself in a veil of modesty so as to increase its power. When the gang appeals to external elements through journals, reviews and leaflets, it thinks it has to speak on the level of the mass in order to be understood. It talks about the immediate because it wants to mediate. Considering everone outside the gang an imbecile, it feels obliged to publish banalities and bullshit so as to successfully seduce them. In the end, it seduces itself by its own bullshit and is thereby absorbed by the surrounding milieu. However, another gang will take its place, and its first theoretical wailings will consist of attributing every misdeed and mistake to those who have preceded it, looking in this way for a new language so as to begin again the grand practice of seduction; in order to seduce, it has to appear to be different from the others. [p 27]

Once within the gang (or any type of business) the individual is tied to it by all the psychological dependencies of capitalist society ... Even in those groups that want to escape the social givens, the gang mechanism nevertheless tends to prevail because of the different degrees of theoretical development among the members who make up the grouping. The inability to confront theoretical questions independently leads the individual to take refuge behind the authority of another member, who becomes objectively, a leader, or behind the group entity, which becomes a gang. [p 27]

To belong in order to exclude, that is the internal dynamic of the gang ... Even an informal group deteriorates into a political racket, the classic case of theory becoming ideology. [p 28]

On Prestige: Prestige and exclusion are the signs of competition in all its forms; and so also among these gangs, who must vaunt their originality, their prestige, in order to attract notice. [p 28]

In practice, anonymity - understood simply as anti-individualism - means unbridled exploitation of the gang members to the profit of the direction clique, which gains prestige from everything the gang produces. [p29]

What maintains an apparent unity in the bosom of the gang is the threat of exclusion. Those who do not respect the norms are rejected with calumny; and even if they quit, the effect is the same. This threat also serves as psychological blackmail for those who remain.