“The lion kills by looking…It jumps and tumbles its victim, a swipe that throws, more by surprise than by force. Then it continues watching it… The poor little animal that is going to die just watches, it looks at the lion looking at him. The little animal doesn’t see himself any more, he looks at what the lion’s looking at, he looks at the image of the little animal in the look of the lion. He sees, in his looking of the lion, that he’s small and weak… But there is a little animal that doesn’t do that. When the lion stops it, it doesn’t pay him any attention and continues on as before. And if the lion grabs it, he answers with a swipe from his little hands, which are really tiny, but the blood that they draw does hurt. They call those animals “moles”. The mole ended up blind because, instead of looking out, he began to look into his heart; he got stuck on looking inside. And nobody knows why it occurred to the mole to look inside himself. And there’s that mole intent on looking into his heart and then he doesn’t worry about being strong or weak, about being big or little, because the heart is the heart and one doesn’t measure oneself the same way one measures things and animals. And only the gods could do that about looking inside oneself, so the gods punished the mole and they don’t let him look outside any more” [1]
“The mole comes and goes, between tunnels and craters, between burrows and breakouts, between the darkness of the underground and the light of the sun, between politics and history. She makes her hole. She erodes and she undermines. She prepares the coming crisis. The mole is a profane Messiah.” [2]
Köstebek Kolektif (The Mole Collective) is wending its way with a new beginning, a new pace and a new voice! We are wending our way with two aspects of humanness that are aligned with natality: creative thinking and practice. We believe that against the forced labor or the tyranny of the clock time in the work place, these vivid aspects of the life disclose the meaning of being in the world.
Indeed, the mole is already familiar to all of us. It was greeted by revolutionary thinker Karl Marx during the 1848 revolutions of Europe. And more recently, the mole showed its face in the days of Turkey’s Gezi Park Revolts, the Arab Spring and the occupy movements in Europe and the U.S. These have been the times for us to plunge into our lives to draw from it a new vigour, re-discover our existence and the thresholds of the world. Who can claim these times are lost? Yet, we have the apparatuses of the state, war and ideology that strive to hijack and suppress the truths and the potentialities disclosed by these rebellious times.
Against these threats, we acknowledge the indispensability of the platforms of cooperation that will communicate our realities. Although countless local resistances flourish all over the earth, for a long while, we have been lacking a revolutionary path that is building its truth with universal and sustainable grounds against capitalism. For a fidelity to the trajectories of the rebellion that will eventually overcome the atmosphere of defeat in Turkey and the world, we aspire to trace the possibilities of an another world with a vibrant perseverance in our collective efforts.
Capitalism subsumes the nature, the human and their lively forces under its reifying body and drags the entire planetary vitality towards an irreversible death. Thus, we believe that every act of deviation from the direction of capitalism frees the human and the nature. To deviate from the vector of this slow death is to embrace the humanity and the nature. That is the reason that we invite everyone to carve spaces of ‘deviation’ for breathing under the concrete bridges and highways built by the capitalist tyranny that flattens the hills and the valleys of the earth.
What is the Mole Collective going to do?
We insist on the belief that we need to keep alive a “crisis consciousness” against macro-political regimes and the wars – which incessantly try to make us surrender. Learning from the experiences of previous generations, we strive to experiment creating a proto-type of the world we imagine. For that reason, we search for the ways in which division of labor is not determined by the needs of the capital, and try to invent the possibilities of creating cooperatives with principles of egalitarianism.
It is doubtless that the success of such a pursuit of exteriority to capitalism cannot be guaranteed without breaking away from private property and monstrous inequalities intrinsic to capitalism; the separation between intellectual work and manual work; national, racial, religious or sexual boundaries; and the state.
Against such times in which the ignorance becomes a virtue and nothing but the images occupy the public scene, we desire to build a platform of ideas and wonder to force our imagination to its limits and understand the conditions of the present. With publishing cooperatives, translations from international sources, collective discussions, we aspire to facilitate the communication of the ideas and the practices between different spheres of the earth and Turkey.
Learning from the experiences of those who walked against the injustices of the world, we strive to contribute to the generation of a revolutionary subject compatible with the spirit of the time we have been living. We search for the modalities of cooperation that will bring the powers to recover and to rise up for each subject within the conditions of collective existence.
We have countless examples of colonization of the life in Turkey from multiple dimensions: Soma mine massacre; state atrocities in Roboski and Cizre; the prisons filled with the lies of a bourgeois law that only serves to protect the murderers and robbers; the children who are being burned to death or sexually harrassed in the state-sponsored dorms; the women who have been killed by femicide machines or have been locked to the site of the domestic…. Against all of these colonizing and desertifying techniques which hijack the life without ceasing, we see no line of escape but solidarity! We know! We know that the opening up of the infinite potentialities of a future -that has been up until now subjugated by school tests, indebtness or loans- depends on the possibility of this exodus! We know that it is the same possibility of exodus that will bring the liberation of a past under the threat of dissolution due to effacement of common spaces of history and memory.
Our Mole Collective is a new beginning that seeks to ask brave questions for the possibility of an exodus and pace its steps with a constituent desire. It is a new beginning against the fear and the suppression of dignity. It is a new experimentation on the practice of freedom which is nothing but experimenting between the actual and the potential. With our excitement coming from being novice and with our anxiety of a possible failure, we call invite all (im)patient moles to join us:
“Indeed, novicehood. Our lord, novicehood! You shall pick up a stone and then start to sculpt. As it is about to get a shape, you will throw away the stone. Another stone, and another. At the end of the day, you will find yourself among a pile of half-baked forms. Maybe, some others will adore and complete them. Yet, while clinging to another stone, your force, your love and your fear shall remain new and fresh. You shall be laboring with the joy emanating from the anxiety of a possible failure.” [3]
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Translator: Köstebek Kolektif
[1] Subcomandante Marcos
[2] Daniel Bensaid
[3] Turgut Uyar