Vicente Guedero makes the case for a renewal of an anarchist mythos, a thread of story and imagination for the future that can inspire and challenge capitalism’s carrot/stick of end-times and saviours.

The fact that fossil capitalism is in free fall is now undeniable. Realities, such as the global energy decline or the scarcity of certain materials, increasingly complicate the propagandising of capital and the completion of the commodity cycle. The question lies in knowing what path the new restructuring of capital is preparing — whether its leaders will opt for renationalisation, increasing State authoritarianism, the definancialisation of productive capital, more wars, or a mixture.

The myths that currently prop up fossil capitalism are twofold: the already-battered myth of progress which, in the guise of technological optimism, acts as the subjective foundation of capitalist production today, and on the other hand, the myth of the end of the world — the inexplicable arrival of apocalypse, which obscures the real causes of the ongoing disaster.

The main problem in the West is that popular viewpoints seesaw frantically between these two sides. When the fear of a planetary catastrophe shakes us to the point of despair, high technology steps in to help us. When this accelerates the planet’s destruction, deepens our separation from nature, when it externalises the horrors that loom ever closer, and labour exploitation intensifies, the idea that everything is collapsing reappears and the myth of an inescapable end is reactivated. In response, technology reappears, renewed, as the new salvation. This back-and-forth creates a spiraling cycle that ultimately leads to nihilism.

In this context, one of the main objectives of the proletarian movement, in addition to developing a theory of emancipation and imposing new ways of generating and sharing knowledge, will be to escape this harmful swerving between omnipotence and impotence.

It is not enough to weaken the mythical basis of pro-capitalist discourse, however. Like it or not, thought cannot do without myth — their mythos will need to be replaced with others.

Main obstacles to the creation of new myths

Granted, this task is far from easy. The first big obstacle when creating new myths has to do with the fact that these will not necessarily be emancipatory, no matter how anti-capitalist they may appear to us. In fact, many reactionary movements, driven by a clearly counter-revolutionary romanticism — and exploiting the fear, despair, and nihilism that capitalism itself fosters — are already spreading their own myths within certain sectors of the population, serving the interests of the exploiters. Historical fascism understood this well and was able to tap into the collective unconscious without much resistance, amplifying pure irrationality, the instinct of competitiveness in its most aggressive form, or the glorification of force and the barbaric man. Redirecting the romantic cult of love towards empty ideals like that of the nation or the leader. In fact, we must not overlook the possibility that in future scenarios neo-fascism and the more radical factions of national-populisms, given the decreasing global availability of fossil fuels and mineral resources, may decide to abandon their technophilic fantasies and shift towards a return to regimes comparable to absolute monarchies of the 16th, 17th or 18th centuries. Or to organisational systems similar to those of the Late Middle Ages, or the darkest forms of feudalism. Examples of this can be seen in Alexander Dugin’s¹ “Fourth Political Theory” or in the Localist Party that emerged in France in 2021, but the degrowth drifts of national populism could point in many other directions.

In this context of unstoppable energy decline, minoritarian movements coming from the far-right and the national-socialist sphere have in fact already begun in taking charge of these limitations. An example can be seen in certain rural-patriot collectives in the Kingdom of Spain that are promoting a ruralising discourse, a return to the countryside and the old traditions, like some of today’s Carlist parties or the Caetera project, a patriotic movement that aims to repopulate abandoned villages. While it is true that these movements have abandoned the myth of progress, they have done so by clinging into an aberrant derivation of the myth of the collapse, the myth of the great replacement, which claims that all the identities and ethnicities of the European nations are at risk of disappearing due to mixing with immigrant populations.

Of course, this myth is supported by other, secondary myths such as the myth of the barbarian, whose main proponent in Spain is Gonzalo Rodríguez. This myth, idealising virility, honor, authoritarianism and a connection with nature, proposes reconnecting today’s world with the archetypical barbarian figure, a figure that had already been fetishised by the 19th century romanticism in its own way but which today would have a historic mission of toppling the current decadent civilisation, positioned in stark opposition to the figure of the savage, i.e., the immigrant. Unfortunately this myth, amplified by the myth of the great replacement, is gaining traction among certain minoritarian sectors of the national-socialism sphere alongside some patriotic and identitarian groups.

A second obstacle we encounter is the difficulty in spreading alternative myths because neither revolutionary organisations nor popular movements have access to the big media outlets, information networks, and entertainment platforms. Thirdly, it must be remembered that the myth is a collective reality that requires entire populations to embrace it, that everyone participates of the same will to believe in the myth. And to all this, we can add one last difficulty: the social absorption process of a myth would be so slow and gradual that it would require decades to take root. This leads us to a first conclusion: that collectives in struggle, and even less so the proletariat, cannot design myths on demand, nor quickly. At most, the popular movement can gather intuitions and mold shared desires with the hope that, over time, from all these aspirations, a protomyth emerges, a synthesis of all the desires involved in a same communal project.

But before addressing this issue we should distinguish between myths that might exist in a future, already emancipated society, and those that could well accompany and stimulate current struggles. If we don’t want ecoliberalism and ecofacism to monopolise the mythical terrain with their fantasies of omnipotence and patriotic idealism respectively, it is urgent to begin, as soon as possible, the task of creating other myths that are liberating, participatory and non-exclusionary; myths we could call transitional myths or destituent myths.

From the myth of the revolt to the revolt of the myth

I do not intend to establish a political program to follow but to offer some possible lines of action, to which many others could be added. I will then propose some myths which we can cling to in these fast-paced times.

First, we can take note of myths that contribute to mental liberation, destroying the coercions that modern capitalism has imposed on the human spirit, like the myths that throughout the 20th century were put in practice by many surrealists. As an example, we have the inversion of the myth of Melusine elaborated by André Breton. This myth sought to free women from the repressions that the aristocracy had imposed on them for centuries, as well as to rely on them to ward off coming catastrophes.

We can also think of altering of the Oedipus myth through which the surrealist Ghérasim Luca developed a new conception of love, one not based on the castration complex, or bourgeois romantic love. Similar examples can be found in international exhibitions, such as the one organised by the surrealist movement in New York in 1942, under the title First Papers of Surrealism, with a central theme of “The survival of certain myths and some other myths in growth or formation”, where myths revolving around the Quest for the Holy Grail, the Androgyne, the Philosopher’s Stone, or the Great Transparents, were developed. Juan Eduardo Cirlot, although not from a surrealist standpoint, on the occasion of watching the film The War Lord in the late 1960s, created a powerful personal myth by inverting the myth of Ofelia. In one of the film’s most famous scenes, Bronwyn emerges from a lake where she was bathing, and Cirlot sees in her an Ophelia returning from the waters to avenge the male authority and repression that had driven her to suicide, which gave rise to his fascinating Bronwyn cycle.

Secondly, if we take into account how far recent processes of the digitalisation of life have gone, these new myths must respond to perhaps the greatest threat facing humanity: that of expulsion from one’s own body, of being pushed to repudiate the humble and fragile matter that constitutes us. Certainly, in a present characterised by the digitalisation of presence and the total interference of social networks, artificial intelligence and virtual reality in our lives, the main objective of any emancipation movement should be to recover the clarity of carnal essences.

Faced with this absolutism of disembodied spirituality, I therefore propose other liberating mythical forms such as the recovery of the old Judeo-Christian myth of reincarnation.

Thirdly, in addition to strengthening this foundational myth to begin a process of autonomy building from the body itself, we should activate myths that drive us to desire other forms of life, sustained by much lower energy consumption. In this sense, a myth that we should recover is the myth of the noble savage, very present in European thought and in the literature of the Modern Age. If we transplant this to the present, in clear opposition to the myth of the barbarian and the automaton, it would take on a new meaning by representing a subject that adapts more easily to an energy scarcity, such as the one we will be facing. An individual who would not need many of the so-called comforts provided by industrial society and who would willingly embrace the ruralisation to which we are headed. Against the myth of the barbarian, we should oppose the myth of the savage barbarian.

On the other hand, we need myths that not only adapt us to the inevitable global energy shortage, deglobalisation and deindustrialisation that lie ahead, but that are based, as the political philosopher Sandrine Aumercier rightly says, on “emancipation criteria”². We need the strength of myths to make us desire that this impending scarcity unfold under conditions of equity and justice, or, in other words, we need myths inspiring decent, popular movements to penetrate into the future and make the revolution.

Some myths from the past could serve for this purpose, such as the worker’s myth of the Great Evening, a mobilising myth that inspired so many revolutionary romantics and utopian socialists during the 19th century. Equally useful would be the famous myth of the general strike, a myth that in addition to strengthening the struggles of the workers, shows how impossible it is for the wealthy to satisfy their needs on their own and whose later derivations, such as the myth of the human strike, strongly opposed capitalist general mobilisation from the second half of the 20th century onward.

Finally, it would be highly beneficial to elaborate myths encouraging respectful and humble connections with nature. Without falling into any form of cultural appropriation, myths from indigenous communities could serve as an example to follow, such as the Pachamama myth of the Andean peoples or Mapuche cosmovision.

It might also be tempting to draw on the famous myth of Gaia, a myth widely embraced by the environmental movements, but that is, to my understanding, strongly anthropocentric. When Gaia is fully subjected to meaning, the desire to embrace her quickly arises, and when the ecologist seeks this embrace, they discover that they can only embrace the air, close their eyes, and pretend Gaia reciprocates. The ecologist finds a clear and serene perspective, but at the same time falls into a vicious circle; Gaia, conceived in a dreamlike confusion of the human and the non-human, acquires a sense of ownership when she comes to embrace us. Thanks to our childhood memories we are accustomed to seeing Gaia as a kind of mother — if we signal to her, she mimics our signals, if we cast a look of disdain, she strikes us with a heatwave. It attempts to assign the omniscience of God to the planet, to make it into the image of the enlightened human and turn it into an object of worship and care. This is why, under a biocentric and rationalist perspective, much environmentalism seems to be stagnating. This is why we need to equip ourselves with other myths that help us transcend the conception of the environment as a mere stage for human, biological, or geological actions. In Prolegomena to a Third Surrealist Manifesto or Not, Breton leaves the door open to a new myth based on the existence of hypothetical beings “foreign to the system of sensory references of humans”³ and “who manifest to us through fear and the sense of chance”⁴, which he called the Great Transparents. This nascent myth could help us craft other equally stimulating and revealing myths to establish a respectful, and in a way, enchanted relationship with all that the planet still has that is unknowable and unmapped.

This myth would also lower the modern subject from the pedestal which science, technology and enlightenment have placed it on. And what better way to achieve this than to confront that subject with devastating earthquakes, the threatening eruptions of volcanoes, the unexpected flooding of rivers or the very expansion of the Sun in its final stage of life — that is, everything that shows its vulnerability to the cosmos? The modern myth of the end of the world, which capitalism activates in popular imagination, that crude and spectacular end that either leads us to nihilism or induces us to activate fantasies of technological omnipotence as salvation, obliterates that ancient myth of the perception of cataclysm, whether in the form of a nature that is destructive on its own, angry gods, or enigmatic world-devourers.

And thus, trapped in rationalism, the desolation brought about by industrial ecocide and climate tragedy robs us of that experience of disaster, that admiring fear in the face of threatening forces that surpass us, such as cyclones, earthquakes, or massive storms, energies that transcend capitalist devastation and force us to return to a primordial vulnerability, a lost humanity, so necessary to, in future scenarios, place ourselves again among the ecosystems without generating desires to dominate, control or exploit them.

One way to foster the creation of this myth was provided by the Grupo surrealista de Madrid, in their game Son los grandes transparentes los que se manifiestan. Por una mitopoiesis del fin del mundo (“It is the Great Transparents who manifest. For a mythopoesis of the end of the world”), created in 2020 and published in issue 23-24 of the Salamandra magazine. Intervención surrealista, a game proposed by José Manuel Rojo consisted, in a poetic format, of all sorts of spells and inaugural myths responding to the furore caused by the destructive passage of Hurricane Gloria through the Iberian Peninsula, because, as indicated in the explanatory note for the game: “the material and psychological decompression must be filled with disenchanted reason and the myth that desperately seeks to reinterpret the disaster, accept the sacrifice for the profanation of limits, transmute darkness into light even if it’s black, breathe poetic thought into the limbs and organs of the agonising world to heal it wounds and, who knows, reinvent hope.”⁵

***

These are, at first glance, some directions that, without intending to position myself as a spokesperson for the exploited and excluded, I believe could be useful to popular movements in the realm of the mythic to drive current and upcoming struggles. It goes without saying that these proposals are not trying at any point to be closed formulas, nor do they respond to rigid nor superior organisational principles. A libertarian mythology will be shaped by the intensification of class antagonisms, within the social praxis of the proletarian movement, and will mutate in an unpredictable way in the conflicts of the coming scenarios, scenarios that unfortunately will be much harsher and difficult for the workers and the excluded.

~ Vicente Guedero
Bachelor of Exact Sciences, writer, collagist, secondary education teacher, member of the Grupo Surrealista de Madrid.

A more extended version of the first part of this text was published in May 2023 as a booklet in issue 49 of the libertarian magazine Ekintza Zuzena.

Translated by Mateo Sgambati

1. Aleksandr Dugin, with his Fourth Political Theory, proposed a supposed transcendence of liberalism, socialism, and fascism, based on a radical opposition to modernity and postmodernity, as well as a return to a traditional worldview of all the world’s peoples. ↩︎
2. Sandrine Aumercier, El muro energético del capital, Ed. Milvus, 2023, p. 311. Spanish translation by Pedro Coiro. Original French title, Le mur énergétique du capital. ↩︎
3. André Breton, «Prolegómenos a un tercer manifiesto del surrealismo o no» (1942), in Manifiestos del surrealismo, Ed. Visor, Madrid, 2002, p. 216. Original French title, Prolégomènes à un troisième manifeste du surréalisme ou non. ↩︎
4. Ibid. ↩︎
5. Jose Manuel Rojo, «Son los Grandes Transparentes los que se manifiestan Por una mitopoiesis del fin del mundo», in Salamandra. Intervención surrealista nº 23‐24, Ed. La Torre Magnética, Madrid, 2021, p. 60. ↩︎