The Way Out

head, sometimes he lost his footing, and often he forgot what had happened while he was drunk. One evening he’d arrived home at the usual hour to find a surprise intervention staged to rescue him. His friends from past years and his relatives were worried and wanted to tell him how alcohol had made them lose a dear friend and an honest man. They all read aloud the letters they’d written for him and spoke of friendship and life, recalling anecdotes from the past. It was all so sentimental, so full of good intentions and false hopes, that it seemed like a farce. His wife already had his suitcase packed because they were going to put him in an institution that very night. But he’d escaped from the clinic and now didn’t really know where to go. They’d suspended his bank account. We went to the ATM at the end of the platform, and I gave him two hundred dollars. He was surprised and walked off peacefully over the bridge to the other side, to catch a train toward Philadelphia. I imagined him in a cybercafe, contending with brokers in Japan, using the two hundred dollars to make some money on the Tokyo market and then renting a car and escaping to the south.

Menéndez’s decision to suppress the environmentalist groups and arrest their leaders provoked waves of protest in the intellectual circles of New York and Los Angeles. There were reports of outrage and abuse. At the end of May, the Freedom Club sent a second letter to The New York Times. A white envelope with a name (Francis Ben Imnifred) whose initials formed the acronym FBI, and an address, 549 Wood Street, Woodlake, CA 93286. Inside there was a brief handwritten note, first demanding for the repression of alternative groups to cease, and second announcing that they would send a text on “Industrial society and its future”; if the text was published in the newspapers, the attacks would stop.

After some deliberation and discussion, the Federal Bureau allowed the publication of the Manifesto. According to Parker, Menéndez distributed the report among the advisers in his unit, with the aim of seeing whether they could detect any characteristics in its style that might identify the author. The Manifesto was published the following week in The New York Times and the Washington Post.

Chapter Eight

1

Unlike typical political pamphlets, the Manifesto on Techno-Capitalism was a systematic essay, with a structure of numbered paragraphs in thematic sequences in the style of analytic philosophy. It had no rhetoric or belligerent demands; the author wrote more like an academic than a politician. “More like a professor than a prophet,” said Nina, paraphrasing her venerated Bertrand Russell. (“Aristotle,” Russell once said, “is the first to write like a professor… not an inspired prophet.”)

It had a clear conception of how to get a message to circulate in the present time (so discordant in its words and sounds). The leap into evil, the decision to kill was bound to the will to be heard. I’ll transcribe paragraph 96 (“Freedom of the Press”) from the manifesto here:

Anyone who has a little money can have something printed, or can distribute it on the Internet or in some such way, but what he has to say will be swamped by the vast volume of material put out by the media, hence it will have no practical effect. To make an impression on society with words is therefore almost impossible for most individuals and small groups. Take us (FC) for example. If we had never done anything violent and had submitted the present writings to a publisher, they probably would not have been accepted. If they had been accepted and published, they probably would not have attracted many readers, because it’s more fun to watch the entertainment put out by the media than to read a sober essay. Even if these writings had had many readers, most of these readers would soon have forgotten what they had read as their minds were flooded by the mass of material to which the media expose them. In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people.

“First time I’ve ever heard something like that,” said Nina. Killing “some people” to gain readers. It’s a terrifying paragraph. The terrorist as a modern writer, direct action as a deal with the Devil. I enact evil in its purest state in order to improve my thought and express ideas that call all of society into question. Its truth is guaranteed given that the author was able to infiltrate the system’s networks of control and repression and carry out dozens of attacks with homemade bombs for almost twenty years without ever being traced.

At the center of this dissertation lay the critique of capitalism, considered as a complex system with a great capacity for expansion and technological renewal. Without getting into sentimental descriptions of social inequity, the manifesto defined capitalism as a living organism that reproduced ceaselessly, a Darwinian Mutant, “no longer a phantom,” it claimed ironically, “but rather an alien,” which, in its technological transformation, announced the emergence of cultural forms that did not even follow the norms of the society that had produced them.

Capitalist production is, first of all, an expansion of new capitalist social relations. Therefore it is impossible for the system to improve or be reformed because it seeks only to reproduce the capitalist relation, renewed and expanded in scale. Financial markets collapse, economies burst like bubbles, and that’s how capital grows. It analyzed the failure of the USSR and its satellite states and the dominance of capital in China and old colonial territories in the East as a new phase in capitalism’s march in search of empty spaces. That territorial expansion (which the media calls the fall of the wall) unleashed new energies and allowed