bolo'bolo
If you dream together, it's reality.
-- Brazilian folk song
A Big Hang-over
Life on this planet isn't as agreeable as it could be. Something obviously went wrong on spaceship Earth, but what? Maybe it was a fundamental mistake when nature (or whatever it was) came up with the idea "Man." Why should an animal walk on two feet and start thinking? It seems we haven't got much of a choice about that, though; we've got to cope with this error of nature, with ourselves. Mistakes are made in order to learn from them. In prehistoric times our deal seems to have been not so bad. During the Old Stone Age (50,000 years ago) we were only few, food (game and plants) was abundant, and survival required only little working time and moderate efforts. To collect roots, nuts, fruits or berries (don't forget mushrooms) and to kill (or easier still, trap) rabbits, kangaroos, fish, birds or deer, we spent about two or three hours a day. In our camps we shared meat and vegetables and enjoyed the rest of the time sleeping, dreaming, bathing, making love or telling stories. Some of us took to painting cave walls, carving bones or sticks, inventing new traps or songs. We used to roam (along our songlines) about the country in gangs of 25 or so. with as little baggage and property as possible. We preferred the mildest climates, like Africa's, and there was no "civilization" to push us away into deserts, tundras, or mountains. The Old Stone Age must have been a good deal if we can trust the recent anthropological findings. That's the reason we stuck it out for several hundred thousands of years - a long and happy period compared to the 200 years of the present industrial nightmare.Then somebody must have started playing around with seeds and plants and invented agriculture. It seemed to be a good idea: we didn't have to walk far away to get vegetables any more. But life became more complicated, and restrictive. We had to stay in the same place for at least several months, keep the seeds for the next crop, plan and organize work on the fields. The harvest also had to be defended against our nomadic gatherer/hunter cousins, who kept insisting that everything belonged to everybody. Conflicts between farmers, hunters and cattle breeders arose. We had to explain to others that we had "worked" to accumulate our provisions, and they didn't even have a word for "work." With planning, withholding of food, defense, fences, organization and the necessity of self- discipline we opened the door to specialized social organisms like priesthoods, chiefs, armies. We created fertility religions with rituals in order to keep ourselves convinced of our newly chosen lifestyle. The temptation to return to the free life of gatherers/hunters must always have been a threat. Whether it was patriachate or matriarchate, we were on the road to statehood.With the rise of the ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia, India, China and Eygpt, the equilibrium between man and natural resources was definitely ruined. The future break-down of our spaceship was programmed. Centralized organisms developed their own dynamics; we became the victims of our own creations. Instead of the two hours per day, we worked ten hours and more on the fields and construction grounds of the pharaohs and the caesars. We died in their wars, were deported as slaves when they needed us for that. Those who tried to return to their former freedom were tortured, mutilated, crucified.With the start of industrialization, things didn't get better. To crush the peasant rebellions and the growing independence of craftsmen in the towns, they introduced the factory system. Instead of foremen and whips, they used machines. They dictated to us our work rhythms, punished us automatically with accidents, kept us under control in huge halls. once again "progress" meant working more and more under still more murderous conditions. From 1440 hours per year in 1300 work rose to 3650 hours in 1850 - in 1987 it was at 2152 and is rising. The whole society and the whole planet was turned into one big Work Machine. And this Work Machine was simultaneously a War Machine for anybody outside or inside who dared oppose it. War became industrial, just like work; indeed, peace and work have never been compatible. You can't accept to be destroyed by work and prevent the machine you create with it from killing others. You can't refuse your own freedom and not threaten the freedom of others. War became as absolute as work.The early Work Machine produced strong illusions of a "better future". After all, if the present was so miserable, the future must be better. Even the working class organizations became convinced that industrialization would lay the basis for a society of more freedom, more free time, more pleasures. Utopians, socialists and communists believed in industry. Marx thought that with its help man would be able to hunt, make poetry, enjoy life again. (Why the big detour?) Lenin and Stalin, Castro and Mao, and all the others demanded More Sacrifice to build the new society. But even socialism only turned out to be another trick of the Work Machine, extending its power to areas where private capital couldn't or wouldn't go. The Work Machine doesn't care if it is managed by transnational corporations or state bureaucracies, it's goal is the same everywhere: steal our time to be able to steal the next generation's time.The industrial Work and War Machine has definitely ruined our spaceship earth and its predictable future: the furniture (jungles, woods, lakes, seas) is torn to shreds; our playmates (whales, turtles, tigers, eagles) have been exterminated or are endangered; the air (smog, acid rain, ozone, industrial exhaust gases) stinks and has lost all sense of balance; the pantries (fossile fuels, coal, metals, water) are being emptied; complete self-destruction (nuclear holocaust) is being prepared for. We aren't even able to distribute enough food to all the passengers of this wretched vessel. We've been made so nervous and irritable that we're ready for the worst kind of nationalist, racial or religious wars. For many of us, nuclear holocaust isn't any longer a threat, but rather a welcome deliverance from fear, boredom, oppression and drudgery.Three thousand years of civilization and 200 years of accelerated industrial progress have left us with a terrible hang-over. "Economy" has become a goal in itself, and we're about to be swallowed by it. This hotel terrorizes its guests. Even when we're guests and hosts at the same time.
The Planetary Work Machine
The name of the monster that we have let grow and that keeps our planet in its grips is: The Planetary Work Machine. If we want to transform our spaceship into an agreeable place again, we've got to dismantle this Machine, repair the damage it has done, and come to some basic agreements on a new start. So, our first question must be: how does the Planetary Work Machine manage to control us? How is it organized? What are its mechanisms and how can they be destroyed? It is a Planetary Machine: it eats in Africa, digests in Asia, and shits in Europe. It is planned and regulated by international companies, the banking system, the circuit of fuels, raw materials and other goods. There are a lot of illusions about nations, states, blocs, First, Second, Third or Fourth Worlds, but these are only minor subdivisions, parts of the same machinery. Of course there are distinct wheels and transmissions that exert pressure, tensions, frictions on each other. The Machine is built on its inner contradictions: workers/capital; private capital/state capital (capitalism/socialism); development/underdevelopment; misery/waste; war/peace; women/men; etc. The Machine is not a homogenous structure; it uses its internal contradictions to expand its control and to refine its instruments. Unlike fascist or theocratic systems or like in Orwell's 1984, the Work Machine permits a "sane" level of resistance, unrest, provocation and rebellion. It digests unions, radical parties, protest movements, demonstrations and democratic changes of regimes. If democracy doesn't function, it uses a dictatorship. If its legitimation is in crisis, it has prisons, torture and camps in reserve. All these modalities are not essential to understand the functioning of the Machine.The principle that governs all activities of the Machine is the economy. But what is economy? Impersonal indirect exchange of crystallized life-time. You spend your time to produce some part, which is used by somebody else you don't know to assemble some device that is in turn bought by somebody else you dont't know for goals also unknown to you. The circuit of these scraps of life is regulated according to the working time that has been invested in its raw materials, its production, and in you. The means of measurement is money. Those who produce and exchange have no control over their common product, and so it can happen that rebellious workers are shot with the exact guns they have helped to produce. Every piece of mechandise is a weapon against us, every supermarket an arsenal, every factory a battleground. This is the mechanism of the Work Machine: split a society into isolated individuals, blackmail them separately with wages or violence, use their working time according to its plan. Economy means: expansion of control by the Machine over its parts, making the parts more and more dependent on the Machine itself. We are all parts of the Planetary Work Machine we are the machine. We represent it against each other. Whether we're developed or not, waged or not, wether we work alone or as employees we serve its purpose. Where there is no industry, we "produce" low-cost workers to export to industrial zones. Africa has produced slaves for the Americas, Turkey produces workers for Germany, Pakistan for Kuwait, Ghana for Nigeria, Morocco for France, Mexico for the U.S. Untouched areas can be used as sceneries for the international tourist buisiness: Indians on reservations, Polynesians, Balinese, aborigines. Those who try to get out of the Machine fulfill the function of picturesque "outsiders" (bums, hippies, yogis). So long as the Machine exists, we're inside it. It has disintegrated or mutilated almost all traditional societies or driven them into demoralizing defensive situations. If you try to retreat to a "deserted" valley in order to live quietly on a bit of subsistence farming, you can be sure you'll be found by a tax collector, somebody working for the local draft board, or by the police. With its tentacles, the Machine can reach virtually every place on this planet within just a few hours. Not even in the remotest parts of the Gobi Desert can you be assured of an unobserved shit.
All or Nothing at All
The Planetary Work Machine is omnipresent; it can't be stopped by politicians. So will the Machine be our destiny, until we die of heart disease or cancer at 65 or 71? Will this have been Our Life? Have we imagined it like this? Is ironical resignation the only way out, hiding from ourselves our deceptions for the few rushing years we've got left? Maybe everythings's really okay, and we're just being over- dramatic?Let's not fool ourselves. Even if we mobilize all our spirit of sacrifice, all of our courage, we can achieve not a thing. The Machine is perfectly equipped against political kamikazes, as the fate of the Red Army Faction, the Red Brigades, the Moneneros and others has shown. It can coexist with armed resistance, even transform that energy into a motor for its own perfection. Our attitude isn't a moral problem, not for us, much less for the Machine.Whether we kill ourselves, whether we sell out in our own special deals, find an opening or a refuge, win the lottery or throw Molotov cocktails, join the Sparts or the Bhagwan, scratch our ears or run amok: we're finished. This reality offers us nothing. Opportunism does not pay off. Careers are bad risks; they cause psychoses, marriages. Bailing out means self-exploitation in ghettoes, pan-handling on filthy street corners, crushing bugs between rocks out in the garden of the commune. Cleverness has grown fatiguing. Stupidity is annoying.It would be logical to ask ourselves some questions like these: "How would I really like to live?" "In what kind of society (or nonsociety) would I feel most comfortable?" What dio I really want to do with myself?" "Regardless of their practicality, what are my true wishes and desires?".....
bolo`bolo
bolo`bolo is part of (my) second reality. It's strictly subjective, since the reality of dreams can never be objective. Is bolo`bolo all or nothing? It is both and neither. It's a trip into second reality , like Yapfaz, Kwendolm, Takmas, and Ul-So. Down there is a lot of room for many dreams. bolo`bolo is one of those unrealistic, amoral, egoistic maneuvres of diversion from the struggle against the worst.bolo`bolo is also a modest proposal for the new arrangements on the spaceship after the Machine' s disappearence. Though it started as a mere collection of wishes, a lot of considerations about their realization have accumulated around it. bolo`bolo can be realized world-wide within five years, if we start now. It guarantees a soft landing in the second reality. Nobody will starve, freeze or die earlier than today in the transition period. There's very little risk.Of course , general conceptions of a postindustrial society are not lacking these days. Be it the eruption of the Age of Aquarius, the change of paradigms, ecotopia, new networks, rhizoms, decentralized structures, soft society, the new poverty, small circuitry, third waves, or prosumer societies, the ecological or alternativist literature grows rapidly. Allegedly soft conspiracies are going on, and the new society is already beeing born in communes,sects, citizens'initiatives, alternative enterprises, block associations. In all these publications and experiments there are a lot of good and useful ideas, ready to be stolen and incorporated into bolo`bolo. But many of these futures (or "futuribles" as the French say) are not very appetizing: they stink of renunciation, moralism, new labors, toilsome rethinking, modesty and self limitation. Of course there are limits, but why should they be limits of pleasure and adventure? Why are most alternativists only talking about new responsabilities and almost never about new possebilities?One of the slogans of the alternativists is : Think globally, act locally. Why not think and act globally and locally? There are lot of new concepts and ideas, but what is lacking is a practical global (and local) proposal, a kind of common language. There has to be some agreement on basic elements that we don't stumble into the Machine's next trap. In this regard, modesty and (academic) prudence is a virtue of that risks disarming us. Why be modest in face of impending catastrophe?bolo`bolo might no be the best and most detailed or certainly a definite for a new arrangement on spaceship. But it's not so bad and acceptable to a lot of people. I'm for trying it as a first attempt and seeing what happens later....
asa'pili words can be written with signs ; no alphabet is needed. In the English edition of this book, Latin characters are only used for convenience-other alphabets (Hebrew, Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, etc.) could also be used.The doubling of a word indicates an organic plural: bolo'bolo = all bolos, the network of bolos. With the apostrophe (') composites can be formed at will. The first word determines the second (as in English): asa'pili ("world language"), fasi'ibu ("traveler"), yalu'gano ("restaurant"), etc.Besides this small asa'pili (containing only about 30 words) there could be created a larger asa'pili for scientific exchange, international conventions, etc. It will be up to the planetary assembly to put up a dictionary and a grammar. Let's hope it will be easy.
In fact, there is really only the ibu, and nothing else. But the ibu is unreliable, paradoxical, perverse. There is only one single ibu, but nevertheless it behaves as if there were 4 billion or so. The ibu also knows that it invented the world and reality by itself, yet it still firmly believes that these haluzinations are real. The ibu could have dreamed an agreeable, unproblematic reality, but it insisted on imaginig a miserable, brutish and contradictory world. It has dreamed a reality in which it is constantly tormented by conflict, catastrophy, crisis. It is torn between extasy and boredom between enthusiasm and deception, between tranquility and agitation. It has a body that needs 2000 calories a day, that gets tired, cold, gets ill; it expels this body every 70 years or so - a lot of unnecassary complication....In order to prevent itself from recognizing itself and finding out the dream character of its reality, the ibu has invented "others". It imagines that these artificial beings are like itself. As in an absurdist drama, it entertains "relations" with them, loving or hating them, even asking them for advice or philosophical explanations. So it flees from its own consciousness, delegating to others in order to be rid of it. It concretizes the "other" ibus by organizing them into institutions: couples, families, clubs, tribes, nations, mankind. It invents "society" for itself and subjects to its rules. The nightmare is perfect....
Das ibu ist immer noch da, was will es noch? The ibu is still around, refusing nothingness, hoping for a new, better nightmare. It's still lonely, but it believes that it can overcome its lonelyness by some agreemnets with the "other" four billion ibus. Are they out there? You can never be sure ...So, together with 300 to 500 ibus, the ibu joins a bolo. The bolo is its basic agreemnet with other ibus, a direct, personal context for living, producing, dying. The bolo replaces the old "agreemnet" called money. In and around the bolo the ibus can get there dayly 2000 calories, a living space, medical care, the basics of survival and indeed much more. The ibu is born in a bolo, it passes its childhood there, is taken care of when it's ill learns certain things, tinkers around, is hugged and stroked when sad, takes care of other ibus, hangs out, disappears. No ibu can be expelled from a bolo. But it is always free to leave it and return. A bolo is the ibus home on our spaceship. The ibu isn't obliged to join a bolo. It can stay truely alone, form smaller groups, conclude special agreemnets with bolos. If a substantial part of all ibus unite in bolos, money economy dies and can never return. The nearcomplete self-sufficiency of the bolo guarantees its independence. The bolos are the core of the new, personal, direct way of social exchange. Without bolos, the money economy must return and the ibu will be alone again, with its job, with its money, depenmdent on pensions, state, the police....
From the point of view of the ibu, the bolo's function is to guarantee its survival, to make its life enjoyable, to give it a home or hospitality when it's traveling. The agreement between the whole of the bolos (bolo'bolo) and a single ibu is called sila. As the ibu hasn't any money (nor a job!), nor any obligation to live in a bolo, all bolos have to guarantee hospitality to arriving single ibus. Evey bolo is a virtual hotel, any ibu a virtual non-paying guest. (We're only guests on this planet, anyway.)...
creating a new paradigm...
after having just read your essay I found my self at lunch with my father in the middle of middle America... a suburb within a suburb... a concrete jungle like all the rest... and my father there across from me telling me about life, religion, Jesus and how America is just and acting in pure defense as he would for his daughter were she attacked. For him this country reacts out of a pure human instinct to defend home and family... to defend the tribe... I am naive to passively allow a violation of my security... When I try to explain that it is different... American foreign policy is not motivated by such pure and loving thoughts... that our aim is power at the expense of all life in our way... even our own sons and daughters... he shuts down... he can not hear me... he can not accept that he is a part of a machine that destroys life so indiscriminately... and who could? Once you lift the veil there is no turning back... to be faced with the reality, the nightmare we have created... is painful.... many of us who are connected to this Earthly body... this "Earthship"... feel so much grief for our loss... lost love, lost life... I cry for the deaths of children I've never seen like I cry for the deaths of my dear friends who have checked out along the way... but out of destruction is born a new dream. Death is life... babies are now being born as our friends are dieing...So how do we create a new paradigm for my father? Can we create a new dream with out first lifting the veil? Must we first destroy the crust of deceit to allow the new truth to unfold? I love that so many people are coming to this point of exchange... trading thoughts of dissidence for hope of a new world... a place of peace and autonomy and balance within the whole system of Earthly life. But I ask us all to continue the struggle to lift the veil and offer this new dream in exchange... And when will we take it to the Burbs? We need to awaken the sleeper... because much of America is fast asleep... And if anyone knows a good method for gently lifting the veil for our friends and family please let us know.... cause Michael Moore is coming off as a crack pot and they aren't buying...   for the love of Anarchy                                                                  Blessed Be
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