#armed joy

May 22, 2022

Last night we vandalized four anti-abortion churches in Olympia. All of these churches have ties to anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers,” religious fake clinics that manipulate mostly poor people into having & keeping children they don’t want or aren’t ready for and marrying whomever impregnated them whether or not that relationship is healthy or safe. Crisis pregnancy centers are exploitative and serve the aims of upholding the patriarchal family, a primary site of violence against women, queers, and children.

A Mormon church, Calvary church, Harbor Church, and St. Michael’s Catholic church all received facelifts in the early hours of Sunday morning. We dumped red paint over the entryways and left messages of “If abortions aren’t safe then neither are you,” “Abort the church,” and “God loves abortion.”

Even in the likelihood that abortion remains legal in western Washington after roe v. wade is overturned, there are still local enemies who are doing everything in their power to make it as difficult and inaccessible as possible. These churches are terrified of people exercising bodily autonomy – whether aborting unwanted pregnancies or taking gender-affirming hormones/surgery or fucking whomever we want – because they need the rigid hierarchy of the family as the basic unit of control. It’s not even conspiratorial to say the Mormon church, Catholic church, and all others that punish abortion and reward marriage are patriarchal sex abuse cults. From the beginning the church has sought to control and destroy every impulse toward pleasure and self-determination.

While a little graffiti may be a small gesture in the war against patriarchal religious control, we wish to highlight that it’s easy and fun to attack. Our enemies are vulnerable and easy to find. In acting we learn to act, in waiting we only learn to wait. The secret is to really begin. There is an anti-abortion fake clinic in Olympia at 135 Lilly Road NE called “Options Pregnancy Clinic.” Its website lists its financial backers including Guild Mortgage, Molina Healthcare, Howard’s Cleaners, Shocking Difference Electrical Contractor, Interstate Batteries, Tumwater Automotive, Timberland Bank, Nichol’s Trucking, Olympia Federal Savings Bank, and Kiley Juergens Wealth Management. Each of these businesses should be considered responsible for the violence of forced birth.

We echo the words of some crazy bitches from over a decade ago when we say that we are not asking for the right to choose, we are taking into our own hands the ability to abort a pregnancy. We are not asking for advertisements or media that pander to trans people, we’re wresting the tools to change our bodies out of the control of doctors. We are not appealing to state power for an end to patriarchal violence, but threatening: “If abortions aren’t safe, then neither are you.”

There is no joy in work, even if it is selfmanaged. The revolution cannot be reduced to a simple reorganisation of work. Not that alone. There is no joy in sacrifice, death and revenge. Just as there is no joy in counting oneself. Arithmetic is the negation of joy.

Anyone who desires to live does not produce death. A transitory acceptance of the guillotine leads to its institutionalisation. But at the same time, anyone who loves life does not embrace their exploiter. To do so would signify that they are against life in favour of sacrifice, self-punishment, work and death.

In the graveyard of work centuries of exploitation have accumulated a huge mountain of revenge. The leaders of the revolution sit upon this mountain, impassively. They study the best way to draw profit from it. So the spur of revenge must be addressed against the interests of the new caste in power. Symbols and flags. Slogans and complicated analyses. The ideological apparatus does everything that is necessary.

It is the work ethic that makes this possible. Anyone who delights in work and wants to take over the means of production does not want things to go ahead blindly. They know by experience that the bosses have had a strong organisation on their side in order to make exploitation work. They think that just as strong and perfect an organisation will make liberation possible. Do everything in your power, productivity must be saved at all costs.

What a swindle! The work ethic is the Christian ethic of sacrifice, the bosses’ ethic thanks to which the massacres of history have followed each other with worrying regularity.

These people cannot comprehend that it would be possible to not produce any surplus value, and that one could also refuse to do so. That it is possible to assert one’s will to not produce, so struggle against both the bosses’ economic structures and the ideological ones that permeate the whole of Western thought.

It is essential to understand that the work ethic is the foundation of the quantitative revolutionary project. Arguments against work would be senseless if they were made by revolutionary organisations with their logic of quantitative growth.

The substitution of the work ethic with the aesthetic of joy would not mean an end to life as so many worried comrades would have it. To the question: ‘What will we eat?’ one could quite simply reply: ‘What we produce.’ Only production would no longer be the dimension in which man determines himself, as that would come about in the sphere of play and joy. One could produce as something separate from nature, then join with it as something that is nature itself.

So it would be possible to stop producing at any moment, when there is enough. Only joy will be uncontrollable. A force unknown to the civilised larvae that populate our era. A force that will multiply the creative impulse of the revolution a thousandfold.

The social wealth of the communist world is not measured in an accumulation of surplus value, even if it turns out to be managed by a minority that calls itself the party of the proletariat. This situation reproduces power and denies the very essence of anarchy. Communist social wealth comes from the potential for life that comes after the revolution.

Qualitative, not quantitative, accumulation must substitute capitalist accumulation. The revolution of life takes the place of the merely economic revolution, productive potential takes the place of crystallised production, joy takes the place of the spectacle. The refusal of the spectacular market of capitalist illusions will create another kind of exchange.

From fictitious quantitative change to a real qualitative one. Circulation of goods will not base itself on objects and their illusionist reification, but on the meaning that the objects have for life. And this must be a life meaning, not a death one. So these objects will be limited to the precise moment in which they are exchanged, and their significance will vary according to the situations in which this takes place.

The same object could have profoundly different ‘values’. It will be personified. Nothing to do with production as we know it now in the dimension of capital. Exchange itself will have a different meaning when seen through the refusal of unlimited production.

There is no such thing as freed labour. There is no such thing as integrated labour (manual-intellectual). What does exist is the division of labour and the sale of the workforce, i.e. the capitalist world of production. The revolution is the negation of labour and the affirmation of joy.

Any attempt to impose the idea of work, ‘fair work’, work without exploitation, ‘self-managed’ work where the exploited are to re-appropriate themselves of the whole of the productive process without exploitation, is a mystification. The concept of the selfmanagement of production is valid only as a form of struggle against capitalism, in fact it cannot be separated from the idea of the selfmanagement of the struggle.

Alfredo Bonanno, Armed Joy, 1977

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