Join the new world

When workers go on strike, the ceasing of their labour opens a crack that allows for at least a vision of another world. It offers an opportunity for an alternative practice. Without work how do we organise to support ourselves? Do we even need the bosses? How could we do things differently instead? As we flee from labour, from capitalist social relations, we run towards communism, we start to imagine and create a new, better world. Dans grève il y a rêve, within strike there is dream.



Some clever French insurrectionists realised that this principle applies to a lot more than just work. It applies to all social relations dominated by capital; to education, entertainment, the family, sex, consumption, politics. In short, to all aspects of human life. And so the notion of the human strike is invented. It in fact reflects the processes and premises already in existence, reflecting the battle with capitalism we all engage in on an everyday basis. When it comes to capitalism, we are all human slackers, but we must stop working altogether. What the human strike strives for is absolute and immediate liberation from capitalist social relations. Since capitalism makes victims of us all, even the capitalists, "the human strike means refusing to play the role of the victim" (Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War).



Critics often throw around labels like "drop-out" and "lifestylism", but in so doing reveal their fetish for the roles spectacular capitalism provides them. It takes some courage to move beyond the activist mentality of feeling special within the spectacle of opposition, having a sense of superiority, of being enlightened leaders. The idea of "dropping-out" from this system genuinely disturbs these people. It is only when you explore the cracks that you begin to realise where fulfilling experience is truly found - until then you have only roles and ideologies to pursue and consume. Jump! Drop-out! Start to play with life and push the boundaries of what is possible.

How does this translate to eRep? If we accept the premise of the human strike, can we possibly maintain any presence in eRepublik? Must we flee that too? Must it be a choice between absolute participation and absolute non-participation? Or can we go on strike and crack eRepublik from within?



The argument I have been making over the course of these communiqués has pivoted on the assertion that eRepublik is not a game, that it is rather a virtual reality functioning within real social relations. eRep is a fantasy, but it is a fantasy that has a dialectical relationship with the real, being both an influence on the real and influenced by the real. Spectacle, as the substitute of real lived experience with its representation, is a form of fantasy - but not the only form. Imagination and dreams are a different form of fantasy that are counter-posed to spectacle. They are autonomous, self-determined, playful and creative - dangerous to spectacle. Between spectacle and reality there is the fiction of our dreams, of our desires. It is this form of fantasy that is key to the question of revolution, here on eRep and elsewhere.

It is commonly said that video games allow a space for people to adopt a persona that supplements their real life shortcomings, to replace the persona they have with an avatar of someone else. But what if this fantasist's identity is their true self and it is the virtual reality without, or with different social constraints that allows that true self to appear? Our imagination reflects our suppressed desires. Within the sphere of fantasy we become our true selves. Suddenly we find that within eRep there is a new emancipatory potential. It is exactly because we perceive it as a game that we can treat it as a playground for our ideas, desires, and how we relate to people and things.

Slavoj Žižek on the Matrix and video games

The subversive potential of such a situation should be obvious. But eRepublik is clearly not subversive in-and-of itself. All the same alienations and spectacles remain - but they don't have to. If we traverse the landscape of the New World with eyes wide open, consciously challenging and negating alienation we can extend the human strike to the world of the virtual and communise it, in turn threatening to communise the real. We can involve ourselves within eRep, but must constantly self-criticise, ask the question does what we are doing counteract capital, spectacle and domination or reinforce them?

If we accept that the internet is not just a space for organizing RL political actions, but a territory of action in itself (as the actions of Anonymous and, more recently, the Anti-SOPA actions suggest), we should think about what sort of territory it is. The idea of an online communism is, I think, a potential for building effective, “weak” social ties, useful in swarm and hive practices. We should be aware of how eRepublik operates as a public space; like, for example, the salons of 19th Century Paris, or the town squares and parks of Occupy. We can communicate a shared ideal which others take notice of.



Now, I know it is unsurprising that the author of articles on eRep (i.e. myself) should say that it can be useful to author articles on eRep. And I suppose this raises the limitations of such an approach to the topic. What is really needed is an ethnography that doesn't prioritise abstract knowledge over lived experience.

The key then is fantasy, dreaming, and play and making our dreams reality. We must become like children, accepting no constraints to our desires and playing with all limits. Create cracks everywhere, not just in eRepublik, and expand them. Smash the spectacle with a communist sledgehammer. Make your very existence an act of playful resistance.

"So,
from human strike
to human strike, spread
the insurrection,
where there’s nothing but,
where we are all,
whatever
singularities."
- Tiqqun