Skylar Fein

Skylar Fein: Why We Write

“The only reason one fights is for what one loves.” — Saint-Just

It is wartime. Eric Blair is crouching in the ruins, listening to a police patrol move slowly by. He knows they are hunting him. Spain is in the grip of a military coup and Blair is part a Marxist group that’s taken up arms against the new regime. Despite the gravity of his situation, at every opportunity he uses the only weapon he has left, a marker, to write “Visca POUM!,” Go POUM—the rallying cry of the revolutionaries—on every surface, shattering the image of unanimous submission that is the natural product of repression.

In Barcelona in 1937, revolutionary thought turned into graffiti. And graffiti now needs only the slightest push to turn back into revolutionary thought.

Defenders of graffiti love stories like the one about Eric Blair—stories about good graffiti—and they have filled books with them. But the obsession with good graffiti harms the cause it aims to advance. All graffiti is good.

Many tedious volumes have been filled with arguments that graffiti is fine art (as if association with consumer goods sold for the purpose of decor would lend it a trenchant cultural relevance); with boasts that graffiti is now the subject of lofty academic study (so is beetle dung); or with pride that graffiti is now included in museum collections (surely its interment in the columbariums of expired culture will cement its place in your heart). Anyone who has seen a permitted exhibition of graffiti knows that the art world brings graffiti to life the way a corpse is brought to life by an embalmer.

Those who try to explain graffiti end up explaining it away, usually as a harmless outlet for minor social tensions on the part of misunderstood youth, something even your grandmother would love, if only she understood it! In fact, if your grandmother understood graffiti it would fill her with rage and fright.

Graffiti isn’t harmless, and no one understands this better than our opponents.

Anti-graffiti campaigner Fred Radtke recently called a press conference to unveil the dark world of New Orleans graffiti in all its shocking malevolence. The big reveal—the result of a decade of work—was a list of the top themes for local graffiti, a list that included anarchism, satanism, gang signs and the marking of businesses to be burglarized later.

This weeping biddie was already locally regarded as a pitiable crank, but this list confirms that his mental decline has been steeper than realized. For further evidence, you may visit his website, where the Gray Ghost (as he is known) can be seen discussing his anti-graffiti strikes and sorties, a tinpot lawman apoplectically blinking onto a dolefully empty parade ground.

His list is alarmingly unmoored in its specifics—marking businesses to be robbed later would be counterproductive, to say the least—but it hints at something true in general: that graffiti is an offensive campaign against deeply held values. This campaign resembles clandestine warfare, and the two have occasionally overlapped, as Eric Blair’s story shows. Graffiti is a sniper’s bullet aimed at the ruling ideology, and if it doesn’t always hit the target dead center, it at least gets a piece of it.

The same week that Radtke stood in a shabby hotel room to deliver his warning about satanic gangbanging burglars, an international research consortium said that by conservative estimate, the oceans would be empty of fish in four decades, a major oil exploration firm said the majority of petroleum reserves had likely been used, the nation’s most venerated  newspaper said climate change would soon subject large areas of farmland to unprecedented drought, the government admitted that half the nation’s tap water was contaminated with rocket fuel, and a nonpartisan accounting firm announced the share of the nation’s debt owed by each U.S. citizen, when honestly calculated: $184,000 and rising geometrically. In a delicately worded warning, the credit rating agency Moody’s cautioned that these interrelated crises would “test social cohesion,” a phrase we will one day savor for its understatement.

It’s worth remembering that Marx’s concept of the accumulation of misery was not meant as a purely economic idea. It meant that the entire quality of human life, as long as capitalism persisted, would grow more and more miserable. One of the functions of the dominant ideology is to conceal this fact, to make misery look like its opposite, and to conjure a hypnotic image of unanimous submission to a deteriorating state of affairs.

The immiseration of the next generation goes forward, gaining speed as it gains inevitability. This betrayal of trust by the political and economic leadership has no historical equal. The veneer of humanity that disguises it is itself inhuman. It represents the frank negation of human life, with the worst blows aimed at those who—living outside the political system, outside the economic system—lack the standing to do anything about it. Surprisingly, protests on the part of the young are rare, and even the most militant factions are capable of no more than petty vandalism. Current youth movements are remarkable for their small grievances, their small demands, the satisfaction of which would cost the state a pittance. Nevertheless, the state responds with vehemence, suggesting that those who own the present see the future far more clearly than their critics at either end of the political spectrum.

We are witnessing the beginning of a monstrous collapse of the central fiction of the contemporary world: that infinite growth is possible on a finite planet with finite resources. This is neither possible nor desirable; in practice it takes the form of a death urge. The word for this death: growth.

Capitalism created these problems and it will not fix them. It marshals all of its forces to insure that these conditions persist, worsening and compounding. It mandates the creation of a hell on earth. And it accomplishes this legally, complete with legislative oversight, judicial review, police escort and air cover, and those who are honest about its end must realize that it will not come from within. No order can be expected to permit its own subversion. For anyone who wishes to weaken it, the issue is the struggle and by no means the law.

In the meantime the political parties debate the minor adjustments and small concessions that might slightly delay the inevitable. But these battles are sham battles between entities that have all been formed to administer the same economic system. There is no opposition party.

Our opponents have nothing to say about capitalism’s creation of a hell on earth, since they are too busy desperately shoring up its foundation: private property with perpetual tenure, sacred and eternal. Yet on this continent it was not that long ago—a mere 400 years—that the land was withdrawn from common use without compensation: it was stolen. Every piece of private property can be thought of as evidence of this original theft, one which must be constantly defended from those who would put it right. And that defense is essential, because to own property is to exclude others from using it—without nonowners, an owner is nothing. Your survival hinges on your ability to work within this framework, reinforcing a property right from which you are excluded, while it is you who gives the property value through your exclusion.

Graffiti is the spontaneous negative product of a society based on stolen property. In the cathedral of commerce, it is an obscenity shouted from the cheap seats at the most solemn moment of an unbearable service. Those who produce it are an affront to the economic system: their work, though prized, cannot be bought, and their labor, though expert, cannot be hired. Their thievery reveals the theft at the heart of the current order. We should be thanking them for their generosity in stealing it back only temporarily.

The people cannot get enough. They demand more graffiti. And if anything enrages our opponents it must be the dark allure that attaches to its creators, the seduction of the resistance fighter who commits devastating sabotage, then slips back into the crowds, helped by comrades and friendly strangers, eluding capture again and again. It is the continuous realization of a great game, one that turns the scenery of your power into our playground. For a time, we occupy the enemy’s territory and dream of turning it into a spectacular ruin.

If you search the land for months, could you find one child who wants to grow up to be the Gray Ghost? In an hour I could deliver a hundred to you who want to grow up to be Harsh, Meek or Read, characters with the local status of folk heroes. Meanwhile graffiti’s opponents sit alone at their cafeteria table, grumbling about their pariah status. They can blame themselves. Fascists—indeed all opponents of free expression—have always had an air of chilly asexuality about them, not the generation of life, but its erasure. If their ranks are thin, it is because the face of a Gray Ghost is always the face of repression.

Most graffiti artists don’t address politics directly. But their actions are revolutionary even if their consciousness is not. They lack theory, they lack a revolutionary alphabet, and this lack is almost their entire platform. But they at least direct their rage where it belongs: at those in power.

The people love graffiti because it points the way to a more intense life. It offers a whiff of freedom so explosive that, if left unchecked, would lead to the denial of every kind of restraint and limitation, and to unspeakable conditions incompatible with social order.

Graffiti is so vibrant it draws even its opponents to it. It alone offers them the possibility of being stirred. We actually agree with them on many points. They call it destructive, antisocial, negative. We agree. They complain that it subverts property rights. We hope it does. We invoke the doctrine of illegalism, but so do they; Radtke has been arrested for painting over graffiti. The question then is not who is right—the question is who will win.

In Spain the bad side won, and the generals established a military dictatorship that would last 40 years. But Eric Blair, though shot in the neck, escaped alive and lived to write a war diary that remains one of the great pieces of battlefield reporting. He had come to Spain as a reporter, but was immediately drawn to fight: “When I see a worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.” After the war he made his way back to England and published these thoughts under his pen name, George Orwell. No one found them interesting at the time and the book, Homage to Catalonia, was a commercial failure.

Some will say that this is only an apologia for an immature antisocial element, a threadbare g-string of authority given to a nihilistic attack on the forces of order, and they would be right. That is exactly what it is.

Here in the ruins of New Orleans, and just offshore, at the Macondo wellhead, two incompatible forces meet for their final elimination match: the ultimate stage of capitalism versus its equally modernized negation. Time is up for the contemporary world. In the spirit of Breton, we should never for a moment worry that this violence could take us by surprise or get out of hand. As far as we are concerned, it could never be enough.

Your system is racing to its own destruction, and we have the advantage: we expect nothing from it. As the reigning order disintegrates, we have no interest in helping you pick up the pieces. We’re going to finish smashing them. It’s on.

ALL IS FOR THE BEST IN THIS BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS

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