Contemporary Globalized Repression by Felix Guattari

The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#13, SEPT-NOV/2014

A certain type of brutality inherited from capitalist societies of the 19th century was still symmetrical with a certain truth of desire. Some people could still free themselves. The progressive tightening up by the Marxist worker’s movement has put a stop to that. Today you can’t desire rupture, you can’t desire revolution, or indeed anything which puts in question the framework and values of contemporary society. Now the control begins in childhood, in the nursery and in school, for everyone must be forced into the dominant redundancies of the system. The repressive societies now being established have two new characteristics: repression is softer, more diffuse, more generalized, but at the same time much more violent. For all who can submit, adapt, and be channeled in, there will a lessening in police intervention. There will be more and more psychologists, even psychoanalysts, in the police department; there will be more community therapy available; the problems of the individual and of the couple will be talked about everywhere; repression will be more psychologically comprehensive. The work of prostitutes will have to be recognized, there will be a drug advisor on the radio – in short, there will be a general climate of understanding acceptance. But if there are categories and individuals who escape this inclusion, if people attempt to question the general system of confinement, then they will be exterminated like the Black Panthers in the U.S., or their personalities exterminated as it happened with the Red Army Faction in Germany. Skinnerian conditioning will be used all over.

Excerpted from Felix Guattari, Soft Subversions, (Semiotext, 1996) pp.81-2.