Now that the masses all over the world have expressed their solidarity with Gaza, I’d be curious to know how social scientist Elias Canetti(1) would describe his concept of the “masses” in such a technological, warmongering and at the same time, exterminating age as ours. He says that mass society exists in the mind of human beings before it materially expresses itself. If ancient societies chose certain social and economic forms of mere subsistence, it was because they deliberately chose not to use bureaucratic or authoritarian methods: they foresaw their dangers. Our ancestors, therefore, were perfect political animals, aware and active observers of the community’s social life.
So what are these squares and streets full of people today, if in our daily lives we go back to the riverbed of a life organized and imposed by others?
Now that the “truce” in Gaza is divulged and imposed with the stamp of the army boot and the mediatic hype on the Flotilla, now that they are silencing and dampening the surge against the massacre, how to transform it into an action going beyond the manifestation and expression of opinions? Power uses human emotions as a can opener; often, the former gives its best in its “delayed reaction” empathic emotion and during “emergencies”, and it coagulates in peaks of scorn. A humanity which is nevertheless still alive despite all the efforts to atomize it. Its more progressive components are proving united in the face of the evidence of an extermination. Over the reaction timing, we should reason at length. Unfortunately, we haven’t yet understood in depth how deceitful and blackmailing the tactics of the enemies of life are, to what extent do commodities and quiet living manage to recuperate the movements, even sincere ones, at least here in Europe. In order to be more incisive and longsighted they have to doggedly overcome exactly the traps scattered over the ground of the struggle, which have the precise function of making everyone go back to the wishy-washy pen of the democratic morals, to issues such as the use of liberating violence or not, to inaction. Let’s move from emotions to self-organizing and direct action. If the roads of freedom are hindered, revolutionary movements of the past teach us opacity and going underground.